Kim Trainor, A blueprint for survival: poems

 

327.45 ppm

I begin with 1972, year11,972 of the Holocene era, the year The Ecologist published ABlueprint for Survival to warn that we were running out of time. My mom ina yellow tank top and bell-bottom jeans grips my sister by her left hand, me bythe other. We’re dressed in identical play suits, apple-green sleeveless topsand sky-blue shorts. I’m barefoot, with a turquoise floral kerchief. I can feelthe heat baked into the granular sidewalk, grit under my toes. From the frontdoor of our house on east 56th, an entrance we never use except forguests, there’s a clear view of Mount Baker. We always take the side entrance—throughthe mudroom where my mom stands for hours by the hinged window, pinning laundrywith wooden pegs to the line, reeling it out to flap in the breeze, reeling it backagain, sterilized by the sun. The snap of white sheets folded into squares. A freshscoured smell of earth and wind. This is my earliest memory.

Writingfrom and through Delta, British Columbia and wildfire season while “charting along-distance relationship,” Kim Trainor’s fourth full-length collection is A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024), a book-lengthpoem around climate crisis, fires and long-distance love, following hercollections Karyotype (London ON: Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (TorontoON: Book*hug 2018), and A thin fire runs through me (Fredericton NB:Icehouse poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here]. Furtheringher examination of the book-length lyric suite, A blueprint for survivalseems comparable Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (NightwoodEditions, 2024) [see my review of such here] for their shared book-length BritishColumbia perspectives around climate crisis and wildfires, but with added layersof emotional urgency. As Trainor’s poem “Iridium,” set in the first section,includes: “I can’t read anymore. / There is no clear way. I will venture outalong white tracks. Mark ink / on green-ruled numbered pages. Lay down stripsof black carbon. Scatter / signals of plutonium and nitrogen, Tupperware, chickenbones, lead. / Absorb radionuclides. Take shelter. Mourn. Make fire. Write poems./ Conserve. Despair. Decay.”

Thereis a thickness to her lyric, writing undergrowth and foliage, of trees andscientific names. A few pages further into the first section, as the poem “PaperBirch” begins: “These are notes for a poem I meant to write in August, butpoetry / seemed very far away then. The BC wildfires smudged the shoreline / ofthe Saskatchewan—everything ash on the tongue, like cigarettes / or coffeedregs, and the sun a smoked pink disc. / I had not seen you for weeks except bySkype (I’ll strip for you, / you said, and you did) but now in fleshmeandering, / now talk, now silence, now climate change and / your research onthe Boreal.” There is something of the long poem combined with both the poeticdiary and book-length essay that Trainor offers in this collection,articulating crisis and climate but expanding into an agency of archival researchand illustrations; she writes asides and footnotes and prose stretches througha lyric framework in an impressive book-length package. This is a highly ambitiousand heartfelt collection, one that even provides echoes of the detailed lyricresearches of one such as Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris, attending to the bigidea through an accumulation of minute details. The scale of this volume isincredible. I don’t know how to begin.