Brick Books 50th Anniversary: Brilliant and Timeless Books to Take Another Look At—Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

We’re delighted to continue our 50th anniversary series this month with Jan Zwicky’s Songs for Relinquishing the Earth. This months blog post is written by Mary Germaine.

In Appreciation of Songs for Relinquishing the Earth

by Mary Germaine

After another brutal wildfire season and a slew of predictions things will only get worse, it’s tempting to say that by now the earth has been relinquished for good.

First published in 1996, Songs for Relinquishing the Earth was Zwicky’s first time putting into poetry what’s now called the climate crisis, and the poems show prescient grief. The images—lilacs, poppies, a “thin stream braiding/over a lip of rock“ and “the sweet forgiving/roll of the land”—all vibrate with their potential to be lost. “Border Station” is coolly prophetic when the floods in the Midwest suggest “the mistakes might have been human.” It seems Zwicky knew how to call out in advance our collective failure to protect the planet.

Once we see it’s too late, what can we do? “Cashion Bridge” offers an alternative to despair or debauchery. It begins with a moment that’s already passed, and then walks west, meanders through the memory of a room with an open window, the memory of a room where the window is closed, and eventually gets in the truck and heads east until the poem arrives at a bright scene at the town dump, where trash is “incandescent with its failure, knowing itself failed,/and singing.”

The songs in this collection are not odes to defeat or total abandonment. In fact, more than one poem is about the trip home, or from one home to another, and this form of travel is its own kind of relinquishing, where letting go of one thing is the same as reaching toward another. We can see it in the “hands poised above the keys, bow at the apex of its arc toward the/string” and then, however improbably, the music begins again.

About Jan Zwicky

Jan Zwicky has published nine collections of poetry, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which won the Governor General’s Award, and, most recently, The Long Walk. Her books of philosophy include Lyric Philosophy, Wisdom & Metaphor, and Alkibiades’ Love. Zwicky grew up on the prairies, was educated at the Universities of Calgary and Toronto, and currently lives on the west coast of Canada.