A blueprint for survival
by Kim Trainor
Guernica Editions, 2024
Review by Leah Bobet
It’s at the end of one of climate poetry’s emerging tropes — that our inner landscapes and outer ecologies are one thing after all — that A blueprint for survival rolls up its sleeves. The fourth poetry collection from Ralph Gustafson Prize-winner and Raymond Souster Award finalist Kim Trainor delves, meditative and magnificent, into the practical implications of all our yearning connectedness. If we need better relations with ecology and each other to make it through wildfires and hurricanes, what do they look and sound like? When we have to move differently in the world, how do we figure out how?
What follows is an intimate, interdisciplinary attempt to blueprint better relations — with space, trees, organisms, and each other — in a literally burning world. Over two long poetic sequences, Wildfire and the more experimental, mixed-media Seeds, Trainor braids together a beginning vocabulary for meeting climate emergency on equal terms. Her components are all enough material for a collection themselves: a long-distance relationship, fire summers, the self-concepts of invertebrates and Sitka spruce, a heap of scholarly references, local activism, and language learning. The result is a simple, subtle, thoughtful, and relievingly humble poetry collection. Working with material that’s frequently treated as epiphanic , Trainor thankfully keeps her material grounded, earthed, real. And in the end, produces something surpassingly beautiful: poems that record a struggle toward better ways of loving, and quietly argue that that struggle’s both winnable and worthwhile.
Creating possibility in the face of very real ecological crisis is no small job. A blueprint for survival gets it done by thinking deeply about poetry as a container: using structure, cadence, subtext, and Trainor’s startlingly deft skill at implication to deliberately build up an emotional and symbolic language all its own. Silent structural discoveries are everywhere: Wildfire — the more traditional half of the collection — names its nineteen free verse and short prose poems primarily for places: creeks, parks, valleys, silently signaling that this is a map. Poems describing isolation, separation, and yearning are still rife with silent calls and answers — within poems and across them, the feeling of being alone is left to be felt unchallenged, while underneath the floorboards, every way those poems are made radiate connection and cohesion. Some of those links are as simple as wordplay: The entirety of “Room B” is held together — sex, language, inarticulacy, and unmarked silences — by how tulip blurs so simply into two lips.
Poems flow into and influence each other, with titles that rhyme just enough to have been a mishearing or a repronunciation: “Wildfire” ends on “come deeper, cochlear, sheltered in my hearing” and suddenly reshapes into “Wallflower.” We’ve come closer, and the world’s changed shape. The “burnt ochre, umber” colour palette of “Wildfire” silently pre-complicates “Ora,” a two-page wrestle with the gentleness of personal and grimness of political Israeli history; its title is Hebrew for “light”. That light bears a tinge of smoke before the first line.
It’s increasingly easy to find oneself satisfied by the second half of ideas one didn’t see starting: Until “North Road” lands on “Silence that is blue like kerosene,” one doesn’t even realize that “Sweet dried grasses of Gabriola in high summer” has ghosted clear blue sky into your head.
This sort of subtle work could in the wrong hands feel manipulative, but Trainor plays exquisitely fair when introducing concepts or symbolic vocabulary. Readers always get a solid hint at crucial allusions before they surface plainly into the text five lines or beats later — leaving a clear trail to the clue for next time. It’s a delightfully generous way to communicate a poem’s logic: keeping the pleasure of discovery for seasoned readers, and then, a few lines later, offering a clear and open door. The space is always accessible; when Seeds opens the idea of “attention as a moral act,” we’ve already seen our attention rewarded. A blueprint for survival, concerned with building new vocabularies and listening close as an eardrum, fully embraces what that type of communication requires: it perpetually marks routes into its internal, intimate language. There’s no keep-away in this poetry. It wants us to learn how to find it.
The combination of all this structural reinforcement and a certain cheerful willingness to telegraph its own imagery has profound thematic effects. Even as long-distance relationship stress, cultural gulfs, and the duality of writing poems while forests burn are depicted with uncertainty and nuance, they ultimately feel workable. Reading A blueprint for survival is being surrounded with solvable word-puzzles. All those chances for success and understanding communicate viscerally that reaching to understand each other pays off.
That foundation becomes crucial as the second sequence, Seeds, kicks off — exploring “forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of climate change and the sixth mass extinction,” each segment centred on a single organism: a lentil, a bee — and the structure explodes. Trainor’s explicit model is a seed heated by wildfire until it’s fertile, and bursts, and true to form, the components of poetrycraft come apart to be examined, relearned, replanted. Free verse splits into direct essay-writing, lists, and miniature lost-language dictionaries; allusions unpeel into footnotes and images into diagrams, both hand-drawn and found. The text comments on writing the project itself: “yes! Each section will be about a seed…onebeing lentil”. “Lentil,” built around a rambling conversation over a pot of lentil soup, inserts a recipe for sada moong dal that makes you wonder, an hour later, if its list of climate challenges and solutions should’ve been read as a recipe after all.
Most compellingly, selections from Trainor’s 2020 journal run fluidly beneath the poems, looking like footnotes, creating whole new spaces to piece together meaning and context. Scrolling along beneath poems about the voice of frogs or trees like a CNN News ticker, the comforting, disconcerting rhythm of everyday climate catastrophe runs on: a SkyTrain out of service, Australia burning, bird sanctuary projects, petitions, protests, work. Stepping back, it’s only making the act of poetry explicit: pulling out the stuffing of all the events that compress and file down into cleaner lines. But it’s a powerful way of demonstrating what’s been translated, transfigured, or left out: the ways we already shape an inner vocabulary, and what grows between the page and the world.
By the time we reach Seeds, though, all this practice at generosity and cohesion and deciding words can mean better things have done their work. Through its purportedly more chaotic structure, equilibrium seeps up through the lines. It takes what Wildfire has built — a small lesson in reading habits and a flexible, tensile, gentle symbolic vocabulary — and successfully manages chaos.
It’s a demonstration of the possible, a blueprint, a process pilot — and, I think, legitimate activist literature of the most thoughtful kind. A few short pages after asking how we grow into better relations, the house isn’t built — but the principles for building it are visibly sound: The carapace of our society may break, but what we build together will hold us together; what breaks may root and grow.
Overall, Trainor offers up a remarkable collection: magnificently full but never overwhelming, intricately structured but accessible and clearly thought — poems that, even in transition and chaos, feels peaceably inhabited. A smart, intimate, and genuine attempt to map a route through transfiguring ourselves into the people who can reach each other and survive.
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Leah Bobet’s novels have won the Sunburst and Prix Aurora Awards; her short fiction is anthologized worldwide. Her poetry has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, and Canthius, and has placed in the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize and the Rhonda Gail Williford Award for Poetry. She was the Utopia Award-winning poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice’s 2021 issue and read for Grist’s Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest. She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds grassroots food security networks as a community organizer, and plants both tomatoes and trees.