Book Review

As the title suggests, the poems in Nanya Jhingran’s debut chapbook of poetry, Into Our Personal Weather, are inherently personal, using the natural world to convey fluctuation of not only our physical surroundings but our interior selves. The collection’s title is borrowed from a line in Adrienne Rich’s poem, “In Those Years,” in which she writes, “But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged / into our personal weather.” Time continues, whatever the moment in our private circumstances, and weather in all forms invade or inhabit spaces without our control.

Birds in flight silhouette the cover and select pages, and throughout the poems, speakers hear, but cannot always identify, birdsong in the world beyond sight. In the prose poem, “Poem for a Soundscape in Flight,” bird call coaxes characters awake in early morning, then the speaker notices “when caw unlatches from bird & flies off on its unwinged trajectory.” She “lets the unknown call permeate hearing, knowing a bird’s call carries more than the bird’s name” and stops “looking for false answers,” finding acceptance in the ephemerality.

In “Night Birds,” objects in decay, such as a repurposed loveseat, gain new life. Here neglected seeds spit out by the city are spread by nocturnal critters “and what spills over is scripted into another / metaphor for possibility.” In this life cycle, a small hope springs forth when we are otherwise sleeping. Similarly, in the palindrome poem, “New Year’s Eve, 2021,” the speaker marks the change into the new year, but “the year abates imperceptibly into its next.” Though time is marked, we cannot feel its passage.

Distance is palpable in “Landscape with Decommissioned Military Base.” The poem is set in Discovery Park, Seattle evoking a haunting still-life landscape the poem’s speaker sits immersed within. Jhingran uses architectural language to ground the central image, the far-off physical structures, among the atmospheric elements. The “summit / of pine-line granite buttressed / against the horizon” and the distant “white colonials” and “worn shingles” remind that so much occurs beyond our line of sight. Many of the other poems in the collection are also rooted in place, in and around the city, and reflect the unique ecosystem of the Puget Sound—the species and woodlands of these places contributing to the physical weather imagery.

The epigraph before the prose poem, “Landscape with Perimeter Fencing,” notes the location, “Nisqually River Basin, ancestral homelands of the Nisqually people,” which is currently home to the U.S. military installation Joint-Base Lewis McChord. The speaker reminds herself to shift her gaze from the natural beauty of Douglas Firs to the “shock-ready perimeter fencing” surrounding a cantonment, yet “this fence, all fences, even the ones I find but am not looking for, sound the public speech of theft.” These man-made fences were erected not by those who inherit the land, diminishing the importance of these barriers to a “performance of enclosure always in need of repair.” The speaker further emphasizes, “The fence is words to enclosure’s language.” That which is enclosed holds more weight than that which encloses. The poem ends with images of a native ancestor tending to the land along a river, a natural barrier, out of the speaker’s sight.

Many of the speakers in these poems are either physically isolated or give the impression of isolation as observers of the environment, which is often a natural setting. In “Right to Interiority,” the speaker is “a figure in the window / too high to be seen from below, hungry / to trespass my way into another type of life,” signaling literal isolation. Though the speaker in “Reading Meena Alexander in Modest Town, Virginia” isn’t alone, she feels isolated among her in-laws as she is “present there only / by force of metaphor, a form dependent on keeping / a certain distance.” Later in the lines, she is a “crab scuttled along low dunes / follow the fading traces where in a storm season / high tide flooded ocean to marsh.” The speaker feels as if she doesn’t completely belong.

In “Uninterrupted Gestalt,” displacement occurs among natural and man-made surroundings. Blue skies replace rainstorms, houses are torn down to make way for condominiums, and new resorts will be erected on land previously belonging to the forest. The speaker acknowledges, “Zoomed in, the world reveals less beauty than accident.” The whole of the picture reveals something different than these images. After the tension of ripples and lotus pads that “can barely hold what is under them,” the poem ends, yet again, with something invisible, beyond the speaker’s field of vision, looking up at her from below.

Into Our Personal Weather exquisitely depicts environments’ intrusions into human lives and vice versa, where the poems’ speakers are spectators of shared experiences that remain a mystery. They illuminate the power of nature to leave us awe-struck and alone, to “feel your categories / close in, encircle, when what you want / is their convergence.” Even in poems where weather, like memory, has the ability to obscure, the new “is ever again emerging.”