Rebecca A. Durham, Be Still Mere Molecule (Raleigh, NC, USA: Broken Tribe Press, 2025) 120 pp. $14.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781965412107
How does a poet witness the world? How does a scientist? What if a person were to be both at once? Would that experience of the in-betweenness of both worlds aid them in finding, perhaps even creating, linkages only visible to someone deeply rooted in both? In her 2024 Tribe Poetry Award winning collection, Be Still Mere Molecule, the scientist-poet Rebecca A. Durham provides us with a few insights.
Divided into nine interwoven sections, namely Ecology, Biology, Ornithology, Botany, Astronomy & Atmospheric Science, Geology, Physics & Math, Chemistry, and Environmental Science, this collection refuses neat categorisation. Ecological phrases pour into Geology. Electrons and valences pop up in Biology. Perhaps, with the sectioning in this book, Durham is trying to tell us that categorisation might be human, and thereby flawed, but in reality, it’s flux that’s universal. Everything happens, and exists, simultaneously.
Durham begins by anchoring us in the living fabric of soil:
‘dark soil woven by hyphae
a mirth of light on mosses’ (1).
Here, the soil becomes fabric and hyphae, the loom. The juxtaposition of dark and light readies us for the adventure to unfold. It also reminds me of lines from Rachel Boast’s ‘The Shortest Route to Madrid’:
‘the poem as a root system / and dark interior spells out / a reminder of when / we were in love with / a secret manuscript, / its mosaic of give and take’.[1]
And so, we dive into the root system of this collection through its first poem, this dual invocation and invitation of ‘step in, step in’(1).
Through the act of writing these poems, the poet is inching to discover herself too, finding her place among the names of all the other natural things. Self as Natural Narrative, like in the lines:
‘I am a kind of story, too
a planter, a keeper, a craver of fractals,
kisser of wilderness’ (2).
But it’s not just self-discovery the poet’s looking for. Throughout the collection, Durham translates several complex scientific processes into lyric form, while retaining her precision, such as:
- Nitrogen fixation unfolds in ‘Desire unspools like green globe chains’ (6).
- Mycorrhizal exchanges appear in ‘Two Fungal Species Among Many Play Telephone and Ferret Food’ (7).
- Capital-driven rubber plant selection is echoed in ‘Is it a Plant Feedback Loop’ (44).
- Collective botanical life pulses in ‘Consider the Plant’s Perspective’ (46).
- The menace of fracking is laid bare in ‘Keep Your Hands Inside the Anthropocene at All Times’ (94).
The poems, as such, become a creative tool for science communication. And what a splendid one at that. This aspect of communicating tough phenomena is present even when Durham translates human suffering into poems. Chronic pain is traced to its molecular roots (18), and grief mirrors a stellar collapse (26). The poet reminds us, that the microscopic and the cosmic share the same elegiac pulse.
The collection has two apparent themes, science and poetry, but there’s a not-so-obvious third theme running like an undercurrent throughout its pages: spirituality. From the first instance of ‘om’ (4), to the ‘green is the heard hallelujah’ (42) facing ‘deity-green’ alders (43), to the almost prayer-like plea Durham makes, in the last poem ‘Look at This Bliss’ (98), the collection provides us a glance into the poet’s internal world.
Durham also highlights the divide between insularity of spiritual prophets and the harm certain scientific inventions have already caused to the planet in lines such as
‘sages say sip untainted everything, as if carcinogens
weren’t already sown everywhere’ (95).
It reminds me of these lines from Ada Limón’s ‘The Leash’:
‘Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine’. [2]
Both poets, with scientific precision, show us what the humans have done to this world, and the dissonance we carry within.
This collection, then, appears to be the poet’s testament of being present here, in this moment, as a human witnessing her immediate ecology. It makes us travel through the ecological world sans humans, the pain of the humans themselves, and the horrors we have inflicted upon the world. The collection reminds me of Mary Oliver’s lines from ‘The Moths’: ‘If you notice anything, / It leads you to notice / more / and more,’ and her ‘Instructions for Living a life’: ‘Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it’.[3] A call which is echoed in the above poem by Limón, when she urges the reader, ‘Don’t die!’ and paints a picture of a hopeful future at the end with ‘starlings / high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay / her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth’.
By writing these poems, Durham declares unabashedly that she’s here, at the turn of each season, and she carries the courage to be astonished by even the invisible electrons jumping valence. It’s as if through this collection, she’s asking us, now what are you going to do about this world we inhabit, dear reader? Will you start to pay attention? Follow my lead?
I know I already have.
Lavanya Arora
[1]Rachel Boast, A poem by Rachel Boast, ‘The Shortest Route to Madrid’, Bad Lilies. https://www.badlilies.uk/rachael-boast-1.
[2] Ada Limón, ‘The Leash’, Poetry Foundation, 2018. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147505/the-leash.
[3] Mary Oliver, ‘The Moths’, Poetry Foundation, January 1984. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=143&issue=4&page=31; Mary Oliver, ‘Sometimes’, Read a little Poetry, September 2014. https://readalittlepoetry.com/2014/09/10/sometimes-by-mary-oliver/.
