Review of Erica Maria Litz’s Lightning Forest, Lava Root

by Haley Larson

Erica Maria Litz. Lightning Forest, Lava Root. Plain View Press, 2009. $14.95

Erica Maria Litz’s first collection traverses the small distance between origin and formation with an unhurried attentiveness. The boundaries between earth and being, body and dwelling, and rhythm and pulse blur in the poems of Lightning Forest, Lava Root. Marcelino Gonzalez’s cover art vividly captures this manic blurring in a firestorm of color that bleeds earth into sky. Across three sections, Litz recipes a pulsating dance of movement, shape, name, and breath. In their unfolding transformations, these themes pump a numinous circulation through the veins of the main speaker, as she dwells upon her family members and her heritage. Inside rich language and raw yet delicate imagery, we follow the speaker through an exploration, perhaps excavation of ancestral linkage and its transfusion of traits.

In “You Fear Thunder and Ants,” the speaker’s exploration very simply begins with the core relationship of mother and daughter: “Daughter, we come from the cloud forests / Of the Andes. . .” These opening lines of the book introduce a family, a letter-like style, and a mystical voice that will accompany us throughout the poems, poems where the Andes are a grandfather’s knees and the Magdalena River a grandmother’s dishwater. Here, the true excavation begins:

I dive. Beneath each country, I run
into dirt. Head first, my nose into bones,
I dig with my teeth, burrow carved stones, and roots,
tunnels under the southern borders, tunnels caved-in by
clods of earth, skulls...

(“Come together, all of you—sobrinos, children—and listen:”)

Within the same poem, we seem to backpedal further, following a curious reverse evolution between human and animal, animal and earth:

My hair, what was left of feathers,
what was left of a time when the breath of blackbirds
incited life, excited mountains to green.

It is this transformative nature of the speaker, the characters, and the images that dance in and out of the poems that lends itself to an avoidance of definition or distinction, or a singular character. The picture never fully flips into focus. In most circumstances, I might identify such cloudiness as negative, however, I think it serves as a success of this particular book. Not only do we see the boundaries blur between disparate objects and ideas, but we understand this link as a mirror of ancestral weaving, or more simply, family. This bond solidifies in the recurring images of the woven ruana, whose “corners can serve as a compass, / just as the four directions start the weave,” a lovely metaphor for a scattered family. Similar to the directions that spread from the ruana’s center, movement bubbles beneath these poems.

Like the Magdalena River that originated from a wave seeking rhythm or the walk of a mother balancing a baby on her hip, pulse and rhythm morph into one entity:

In a cumbia trance, I rocked,
safe in my mother’s womb. While we danced,
my heart echoed her rhythm, relayed
the waxing moon.

(“The First Dance”)

This movement and rhythm dance within the language, creating playful and at times dramatic tension of sound. In “Té’ de Limon,” the first stanza swells like a piece of music about to complete its final motif. We hear the primitive and raw sonic tension of such words as “meat,” “rind,” and a “blade across the oiled flesh.” The second stanza recoils from the fruit massacre with softer, slippery language, the singing of “water and honey,” “calm,” and “hums / lullabies.” Litz’s language embodies the lemon’s violent cut versus the tea’s soft, slow boil, and this acute attention to language and its implications infuses the book.

Word selection, here, plays a larger role than it normally might. We name objects and people to distinguish and differentiate roles—the mother from the daughter, the lightning from the lava, the forest from the root. When the naming is lost, again we lose the boundaries between relationships and the significance of the singular. Appropriately, when this singularity is obstructed, the weave tightens. These poems masterfully weave Spanish and English language and Colombian and Southwestern cultures. The speaker names her God, immediately recognizing the singularity that such naming imposes.

Yes, he could be
the same you’re thinking of, God
not being one to limit Himself
by place or name or language.”

(“One hand on a hip, preferring”)

She ruminates on her own name, a namesake, and at times, realizes a loss of name as a loss of family. The speaker’s mother “speaks for the dead, / uncles whose names she can’t remember,” this from perhaps one of the most compelling pieces of the book, “Twelve Poems for Mama, Her Hands, and the Fire They Started.” A twelve-part poem exploring that initial, core mother-daughter relationship serves to culminate the book’s dominating image—the pregnant woman’s belly—with the book’s dominating ideas of heritage and transformation:

Yet, they know there are places where Mother is still
rain and aching, where she carries on,
where she makes life in an earth-oven,
where she lets smoke bake black into the edges,
where she insists carbon fleece the walls of her bowls.

Rhythm and pulse dance in, “a beat that won’t be ignored—the atriums wheeze, / the chest rumbles.” The movement that yearns to escape from ordered and interlocked bodies escapes like the birds that unbraid from their formation.

In short, this book attempts to forge the connections of family and heritage by obscuring the lines of naming, origin, and epistemological commonalities. At times, the poems rely a bit too heavily on repeated images that fail to transform in their repetition. However, the transformations that sprinkle almost every other element of the book surround these moments of stasis and color them as a pleasant contrast. The speaker’s journey echoes that of Bochica, singing a heritage into memory until definitions become idle:

He sings the methods for making.
He sings them into our memory.
We call back in syllables
no longer owned by any language or name.

Haley Larson pursues her MFA in poetry at Colorado State University. She holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her poetry is forthcoming or appears in La Petite Zine and The Literary Bohemian. Other poetry reviews and interviews appear in Rattle and Superstition Review.

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