**On Ghost Hunting Glaciers by Michael Garrigan**

by Tyler Truman Julian

In an interview, Whitman Award winning poet, Leah Naomi Green explained that, instead of using the word nature when discussing the world beyond one’s backyard, she preferred the phrase “the greater than human world.” Her word choice captures the grandeur of “creation”—without limiting it to Judeo-Christian sensibilities—and emphasizes the reality that humans, in their navel-gazing way, often fail to see themselves as a part of the natural world. Viewing nature as something mystical, of which humans are simply one part, is necessary for engaging fully with Ghost Hunting Glaciers by Michael Garrigan. The prize-winning collection beautifully explores the metaphysical reality of entering the greater than human world. In poems where nature is refracted around and through a speaker that morphs from human to bear to undead elk, Garrigan approaches grand questions of life and death, exploring how and why one man’s life impacts the whole of nature. The poems of Ghost Hunting Glaciers are moving and thought-provoking and approach these enormous questions, while remaining accessible and structurally interesting.

            The emotional core of Garrigan’s collection rests in three interwoven yet distinct narratives—a bear and a man mirroring each other in nature, the evolving relationship of lovers as they grow older, and an undead bull elk that comes to understand his place in the cycles of nature after his death. While all three of these narratives are powerful, the “Dead Elk” series elevates the poems to a particularly mystical plane, emphasizing the inherent interconnectedness of nature. In “Dead Elk Wakes,” the first of this series, the animal returns to life with “a body made of mist” and

                                                He breathes with wildflower lungs
                        He steps like a thawed river worn smooth by sun
                                    —stone toes and alder leaf eyes
                                    pine needle fur and larch antlers—
            He billows in the breeze of a barred owl skimming dusk

The “Dead Elk” series not only exemplifies the poet’s developing ideas of mortality, decay and eternal life, but displays the acutely nuanced approach Garrigan takes.

            The poems of Ghost Hunting Glaciers elevate descriptive poetry into narrative. On their surface, they often appear as simple descriptions of natural scenes but, in these poems, nature has agency and each action described tells a story. The collection is framed by four “Landscape Fugue” poems—spring, summer, fall, and winter—that emphasize the cyclical dying and rebirth found in nature. These poems help build the idea that human, animal, and plant are all part of the same system, feeding and growing through one another. “Landscape Fugue (Spring)” opens the collection, as Garrigan takes a scene and gives it meaning beyond simple recognition of its beauty:

            Ferns unfurl from selves hidden in spores, breaking
            through frozen soil and the cold that held them in taut
            silence. A glancing winter dream of silent stalks and thin
            shadows slowly awakens into Mayapple groves spreading

            down steep slopes. Fungus cradles algae, leaf brushes leaf,
            the intimacy of living is learned again. The slate-blue plumage
            of a belted kingfisher plunges into rushing water; her sharp bill
            scatters stones into the current, swimming, as it pierces a parr.

The power of this poem rests in the agency given to natural objects. It is the plants and animals that enact the changes of spring. They appear sentient and driven by something beyond survival. The poem turns on the phrase “the intimacy of living is learned again.” Garrigan’s is nature that learns, and the knowledge it embodies can become a part of each living thing—man and beast alike.

The poet’s interrogation of life, death and rebirth through nature’s processes is almost Jungian in its archetypes, denoting a deep psychology present in nature that connects humanity to the natural world in primal, latent ways. Humanity is mirrored in the animal world and animals are mirrored in the human world. This seems most obvious in the “Black Bear” series and, especially, in “Old Oceans of Black Bear”:

            1.
            Something’s always following me
                        and I’ve chosen to let it
instead of always looking back;
                        if it finds me, I have found myself.

            2.
            I find enough red elderberry to stain
                        my whole body with its juice each June.
            In September, I squint through slender
                        tamarack thistles for every shade of red
            as the last snow-in-summer is covered with needles,
                        my mouth still thick with sweet syrup.

            3.
            Someday I will doze off in a field of full sun
                        until my darkness glasses over
            like deep inland lakes at dawn and slowly
                        swim in the old oceans of my teeth
            towards islands of wood lilies and holly fern
                        until whatever it is that’s following me
            finds me so we can tread together
                        in the abundance of our shared lives.

The “Black Bear” series develops a narrative of the echoed existence of a human and bear, so, although the speaker here is an animal, the application of its experience is soundly human. As part of nature, we are destined to die. An unresolved fear or simple lack of understanding of death may be the shadow archetype following the speaker of this poem and an understanding and reconciliation with that shadow begins with coming to terms with death’s inevitability.

            The third coherent narrative at the heart of the collection explores the developing relationship of lovers as they age, interact with nature and settle into their relationship. The “Epistemology” and “Stone Swimmer” series expands the psychological and metaphysical elements of the other series in the collection and applies them soundly to the human experience. This is seen clearly in “Epistemology: Parking Lot Muskies,” in which a woman watches her lover fish:

            She’s seen him hook two and land one. Both times
            they yelled together right at the teeth-on-fly moment
            when the world seized and all air left all lungs and a fierce
            violence of water they never speak of again overtook them.

            The one he lost snapped off as he reached
            for it and she stared as he stood in a still sigh,
            silent, line curled, gazing out into muddy foam.

            The other he cradled in water, holding all that predation
            knowing it could tear him at any moment, memorizing each
            dark flank-stripe to trace while he casts endlessly into currents;

bowing to the river and all it held, he whispered to that thin
space between its eyes and she finally understood devotion.

Again, Garrigan’s elevation of descriptive poetry lifts the fishing scene to a place of significance. The couple is growing together through their understanding of nature and their recognition of their place in it. Their love for each other is mirrored in nature and only in their relationship to nature do they begin to understand love and how it has meaning in nature’s cycles.

Michael Garrigan’s engagement with “the greater than human world” in Ghost Hunting Glaciers feels fresh and maintains universal appeal because of its philosophical depth as it responds to humanity’s greatest questions. This collection is a beautiful testament to nature’s staying power in the face of unprecedented environmental challenges. We’d all do well to read it and embody its holistic understanding of our place in the natural world.

In case you missed it—check out Garrigan’s poem, “The River, a Mouth” in The Shore