Noticings of Nature in Pierson’s Aide-Mémoire

By Deena K. Shaffer

Aide-Mémoire was such a ... lovely ... lovely way to end the course. One after another, Ruth Roach Pierson’s poems were heartfelt, intensely thoughtful story-morsels. There was a clear voice, of a poet compelled to write her noticings, her history(ies), her losses ... her life.

What has me mulling this week is the linking poets make — Ruth Roach Pierson here in particular, but as well John Barton and other poets we encountered this session — of the body to landscape. Pierson writes in “Archaeology” (17), “simultaneous selves / like geological strata, striations of a mountains. / Everybody a quarry, […] [s]edimented selves.” Is it in age that, because of (“natural”) death’s ever-nearness, we look for likeness in the natural world around us? Look to things that are also impermanent but are born-live-die, born-live-die, like all things plant and animal? And look too to that which is more lasting, to mountains and other geological formations. Do we do this consciously, as a kind of swaddle (less like at the spa, more like a salve)? Or are we just connection-makers. This is like that, making metaphors as we go, finding parallels between here and there, us and them or that.

Whole poems of Pierson’s fuse life-telling with physical landscaping, geology, natural wonders: for example, “At the Chinese Cemetery” (35) and its “[p]romontories [...] dotted / with meadowfoam and weather-pocked stone formations.” There’s the very cover of Pierson’s collection, which bears Lindy Smith’s photograph of a tree’s trunk and its shadow cast, long, across the snow. Because of, or in the lead-up to, or with and amongst all the book’s many nature references, I become aware of a virtual hum of mourning too to the landscape-likeness-ing in this work (and not solely in the outright elegy, “Glass Equus,” on page 34).

I don’t generally walk around thinking or feeling this way, but after reading Pierson’s text, especially all of its recollections on lost loves and lost lives, I begin to wonder if all ageing is loss? If so, perhaps that’s ... okay. It’s just a question. I wonder then, if so, about the balms. Like lust and desire, like more moments of peace of mind, like having children and their having children. Just questions, mostly banal, but I'm still curious. More to the point, are there, in love’s beginnings or in hot betrayals, a little of death’s antidote? I find myself adding these contemplations about nature, and human tactics to defer loss, into my appreciation of Pierson’s engagements with landscape as permanence. I am excited to notice how Aide-Mémoire also delves into things that renew, into images and narrative experiences of gardens and the hopefulness of growing seasons.