What Is the Sound of Burning?
When I Set the Sweetgrass Down
Will Falk
Wayfarer Books, 2023
There was no word in the beginning. Everything started with a sound. The constant movement of wind, humming an almost inaudible tune; the waters’ rippling whispers; the echoes of interaction between bodies bring us back to the most fundamental tie between poetry and land. Yet where does the poem come from, if not the urge to mimic and capture the voices that surround us? In the shift of poetry from oral to verbal art, we lost the ability to notice how close the sounds we articulate are to the stories that happen just under our noses.
This was the first thought that arose in my mind after reading just a few lines of the opening poem from Will Falk’s When I Set the Sweetgrass Down. It rarely happens to me that so few words unfold a sequence of thoughts that seem so obvious, but make you question deeply the habits of your reading. I have no doubt that this was the purest intention of the author. To grasp the most out of the book, we need to settle at common ground and revisit some facts.
“First, there’s the world” may bring the feeling of a banal phrase. A simple observation that suggests nothing more than disbelief in a more-than-natural creation. Well, this is a great understatement. Placed at the opening of the volume, it becomes an argument against the fragmentation that permeates many modern ways of understanding our surroundings. In fact, there is no detachment from the land, and with it there is no detachment from the land’s creation.
To say that there would be no poetry without splashing waters means that these waters carry ancient voices with its current. What began as sounds eventually took shape as the words I use today in this, hopefully not entirely failing, attempt at expression. At the same time, without fresh springs there would be no functioning body to write down those words.
Reflection on land’s resources holds together many pieces from this volume. Slipping through the pages feels like wandering through landscapes of thought formed in the brutality of admiration. Looking around at picturesque efforts of nature inevitably pulls toward forthcoming limits, exploitation, and surplus, but most of all toward the suffering that comes from the struggle of coexisting with humankind.
Taking the act of writing itself, and stripping it from all the meanings attached to it, becomes nothing more than injecting chemicals into a tree’s dead flesh (“Anthropocene Writer’s Block,” pg. 83). What sharpens the accuracy of this comparison is the surrealistic prelude that leads into it, in which the writer’s body is fragmented into resources: “they turn my skin into leather,” (…) “they stretch me across cushions,” (…) “and one of them (…) builds a xylophone from my bones” (ibid, pg. 82). Within this highly materialistic vision, a tattooed piece of paper emerges as an apt observation.
Those blends of what we are used to call natural and artificial tend to recur often in these poems. One time it is about a coyote living on the roadside, whose immune system has not adapted quickly enough to the measures used to eliminate other unwanted species (“A Dying Trickster’s Last Joke,” pg. 24). Shortly after, we read about worms wriggling through plastics, carcinogens, and spilled, forgotten toxins (“Worms Speak During War Time,” pg. 28). Later, there is a relic of a snake’s body decaying amongst residues (“Only the Stones,” pg. 134). The pictures of coexistence of those pre-human and post-human elements, which in many eyes do not seem to fit, are stitched together into a sort of unexpected pattern. And the book keeps asking how many other beings we can spot just by looking in front of us. Capturing both the diversity and concreteness are part of this writing’s great force.
The possible schemes, structures, and setups of those patterns seem endless. The idea of this infinity leads the reader to the realization – which for many of the poems’ subjects is banal – that the necessity of adaptation is far from being just. The rule that seemed to be fundamentally communal in the cycle of metamorphosis is no longer in place. Although all are subjected to it, the stakes are uneven: humankind chooses to adjust, while the land is more forcefully shaped by the forms of our creation. We have reached the point where a single species became the guide of changes, not only by accelerating its speed, but also by gaining control over it.
How did we come to the point where the idea of laying a dead body on grass so it can decay flesh by flesh, cell by cell, became more disturbing than the standardized process of turning it whole into ashes and placing it in a wooden coffin, to squeeze as many as possible underground? This question turns into a poematic protest titled “Against Cremation.”
The belief that gets examined here is not, as one might assume, the need to separate a human body from others and give it a special place to be celebrated for decades after its death. The resistance that shapes this piece is rooted in a conviction that we shall not get too detached from the faint nature of being alive. We do not arise from ash, but from soil, to which we all come back eventually. Bearing ashes in a grave does not change the fact that all these matters will one day feed the soil, as they arose from what the soil once gave us.
Ash is not the final state of things, nor the initial one. In fact, it is not possible to determine either the beginning or the end. All those transformations cannot be comprehended using the time measurement of a human life, which, in a geological calendar, is less than the amount of time a flame needs to turn things into dust.
One would think there is simply no place for religious belief in this chain of thoughts. However, figures from the Bible come back in many poems and serve as instrumentarium to capture the current state of the subjects’ voyages through various landscapes – those literal, no less than those enclosed in thoughts.
In his book, Falk creates many layers of binding elements that do not stand closely together. In this apparent incompatibility, he finds the most suitable forms of expression. This is how the wandering reaches the scale of climbing up Golgotha. A metaphor that captures the drainedness of a body, which carries not a cross, but over-exploited forests, while pleading for forgiveness. This is also how the human figures in the poems come closer to their animality – in migration, which is a fundamental right of all beings, and in the survival struggles that come with it, such as freezing, thirst, and insomnia.This is how the biblical Thomas joins the ride to erase the doubts in human-driven harm and non-human pain. And eventually this is how the act of cremation serves as a parallel for rising temperatures, which devastate the land that we got to know and settle in.
If I were to take one line from these poems to sum them up, it would be, to paraphrase: we live in times of burning (“Against Cremation,” pg. 72). Worse still is that we struggle to acknowledge it. The eyesight, and let us undoubtedly add that of those with privileges and power, is unfocused. We may not have found a language to talk about it yet, nor how to comprehend this unprecedented phenomenon in its whole complexity and depth. The question that reading When I Set the Sweetgrass Down left me with is whether we even need one… Perhaps instead we should pay more attention to what is in front of us, learning not only to listen to those who can speak aloud, but also to notice sounds. If we are careful enough, we may be surprised by how many of them become drowned out, or even irreversibly silent.
This review has been edited for clarity and style.
Gabriela Adamcyzk is the Reviews Editor for Blood Tree Literature.
She brings a Master's in Literary Criticism from Jagiellonian University and a background that blends communications, climate-focused journalism, and activism. Her work is all about building bridges, exploring different lenses, and thinking beyond standardized boundaries.