Lesley Wheeler
Mycocosmic
Tupelo Press
Reviewer: Laurie Kuntz
Lesley Wheeler’s sixth poetry collection, Mycocosmic, mystifies, engages, and thrills the reader with stories of love, loss, identity, acceptance, and connection.
An example of this haunting occurs in “An Underworld”, a poem about parental abuse:
I stopped my breath for as long as I could
in the grit beneath my little brother’s bed,
afraid of my father. Even the dust would
betray me if it dared, and what then?
The terrors of childhood ring out in many of Wheeler’s poems, which often employ symbolism related to fungi. She is partial to this metaphor, using it to further themes ranging from health to resistance to sexuality to love. Indeed, her poems are love poems that never mention the word love, but rather bring her readers into a universe where spirituality, science, politics, and passion play a resounding role.
Wheeler writes about the death of parents, coming to terms with sexuality, childhood traumas, and embracing the goodness in life, which is emboldened in the poem “Tone Problem”:
Low-down ground by the stream acts joyful.
Bluebells, trillium? Get out of town with your frilled
crillon. Pink Moon, Grass Moon, Egg Moon,
there’s no call to fling brilliance in this
of all springs. I can’t even with such beauty.
Can’t explain to the ardent lilac.
No words for loved-crazed blue jays,
for the cat slinking through lemon-balm.
Calm down, iridescent mist swept
along by always-rising winds. The nerve.
The outrageous auxiliary verb: may be.
Wheeler often uses the metaphor of fungi as a link to relationships. One example occurs in the poem “In the Belly,” which pays homage to women who carry life and bear the burden of caring for all living creatures.
She carries me like a tired parent carries
a limply sleeping child, like an embossed page
carries a warning, like a gutter carries a bird’s nest.
She carries everyone germinant, everyone needling
like sleet or wind, everyone starving or afraid.
In her acknowledgments, Wheeler also speaks about poetic nourishment: “Thanks to my living mycelial network of poetic nourishment,” a sentiment she touches on poetically in Mycocosmic’s opening piece, “We Could Be”:
mycelial, eating toxins together,
decomposing what’s still indigestible
about this place. The singed taste.
Could spread our soiled hands wide,
Vegetate, infiltrate, collaborate.
The last poem in this collection, “Return Path,” is a kind of prayer to the earth.
The only way to pray is through my feet,
earthward, jolted n return by the fizz
of a spiking current …
We are all one. The image of feet in this poem is filled with subtext of every person’s journey, of our shared responsibility to the earth and to each other. These intricately written poems are a testament to a cogent voice urging us to respect the world in which we live and to honor the people with whom we share time and space.
