the female plays house between
the bark & the sapwood she is
hard-wired for love in the phloem
her scent on the walls she rubs
her Avon wrists together & waits
the male finds her intoxicated they
make love under the trees legs be-
come arms hands grow fingers nails
scratch tiny love notes in the bark
summer is short here little time
for courtship in the North: the cold-
blooded retreat to the woods veins
pumped with antifreeze the female
bores deeper into the sapwood she
drags her smokes & her big belly up
the tree carves her birthing chamber
and her coffin with her teeth
Notes on the Poem
The poem "summer: mating season" is the second of four pieces comprising the "Mountain Pine Beetle Suite" from Chantal Gibson's 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted collection How She Read. Let's look at it standalone, as well as considering how it is a powerful moving force within the sweep of a larger poetic statement. A suite is "a group of things forming a unit or constituting a collection". When those things are, for example, musical compositions, they are often intended to be played or performed in a specific sequence. This second of four pieces in a suite named for a North American insect that has become invasive and destructive stands on its own in some striking ways. We've examined previously different poems that wield anthropomorphism to remarkable effect. The attributing of human characteristics, reactions or behaviour to non-human entities, including animals, is deployed in humorous, satirical and telling fashion in "Autumn News from the Donkey Sanctuary" by Ken Babstock, "Beagles" by Paul Muldoon and "Flies" by Alice Oswald. But the creatures creeping through Gibson's poem are chilling both in their mundanity ... "she rubs her Avon wrists together" ... and their unsettling cradle-to-grave tenacity, as ... "she drags her smokes & her big belly up the tree carves her birthing chamber and her coffin with her teeth" Add to that chill this haunting observation about the insidiousness of the mountain pine beetle, taken from the Wikipedia page we inevitably seek out to learn more: "It may be the largest forest insect blight seen in North America since European colonization." We have also contemplated the fourth piece of this suite, "Obituary", as a previous Poem of the Week. The deathly life of the creatures here in "summer: mating season" are neutralized and vanquished by the life force memorialized in "Obituary" ... "she has every intention of coming back"