Poet Lesley Wheeler, on her blog, writes, “Without the work of the fungal kingdom, death would overwhelm the world.” The fungal kingdom is very important to Wheeler’s work: mushrooms that metabolize death become the central metaphor of this book of poems, Mycocosmic.
The title, Mycocosmic can be broken down into two parts: mykes, meaning fungus in Greek and cosmic, meaning the universe. Entering Mycocosmic felt as if I entered a universe of mushrooms. I became so interested in the idea of mushrooms that I spent hours in the bathtub reading about them.
I studied Wheeler’s acknowledgments and came across Merlin Sheldrake, a mushroom researcher, who, delightfully, sounds like a mushroom himself. In his book, Entangled Life, he writes, “Metabolism is the art of chemical transformation” (21). Is poetry also a kind of transformation? Can these poems leap from the literal to metaphorical space in order to transform grief? I think they can. I think they absolutely do.
The speaker of many of the poems seems to be trying to metabolize the death of a difficult father (“My father’s laughter scattered hail” (14)) and a seemingly cold English mother (“Your sister/is beautiful, but you are reasonably attractive” (10) and “The word island makes me think of my mother,/a compass rose who wheeled off the edge of the map” (20)). In “First in Line for Takeoff” (60) Wheeler writes about undertakers taking her mother’s body away and the warm nightgown that she bought for her mother as she was in hospice. Wheeler writes, “No one’s grimmer inside/than me” (60). Mushrooms feel like the perfect antidote to the grimness. They feel, with all of their hyphae reaching out through the soil, as if they can metabolize this, turn death into nourishment, turn it into poem.
The speaker seems not to just find solace in the natural world, but to, instead, view herself as a mushroom in this infinite network. In her poem, “Dark Energy,” she writes “Root-brain speculates into/soil, hyphae nosing toward/rot, digesting that we are manystranded/& one-bodied,/the ten thousand sexes of our/fungal computer” (11). Wheeler’s use of the word “we” when talking about these networks of mushrooms feels like a kinship with these little botanical blooms. And in this kinship, there is a sense of collectivity, rather than individualism. Much like trees, mushrooms seem to cooperate with other species to help them survive. Sheldrake writes, “Without this fungal web my tree would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plants would exist anywhere. All life on land, including my own, depended on these networks” (14). The mushrooms in Wheeler’s book help her navigate the death of her mother and father, so much so that she becomes very mushroom-y. In the poem Vitamin Shine, the diction is fungal, “My photoreceptors/hope for it, converting light into electrochemical/petals fluttering into my thalamus, touching/secret currents” (75).
In metaphor theory, figurative language is often orientational. To be happy is to be “up” and to be sad is to be “down.” Consciousness is “up” and unconsciousness is “down.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write that the physical basis of this is that “Humans and most other mammals sleep lying down and stand up when they are awaken” (15). So, what does the mushroom metaphor impart to the reader? For one thing, I found that mushrooms aren’t individual, but rather networks that work together. Perhaps grief isn’t as individual a process as we think it is either. Wheeler writes in the essay in the footnotes, “I’m lonely in loss, but no one’s alone & no one’s gone, just enjambed & the next page illegible” (74-75). The natural world becomes a refuge, solace. In “Tone Problem,” Wheeler comments on the phases of the moon in the spring, “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” (77). The essay that runs in the footnotes of this page mentions “old-growth poetry”(77). This collection is such beautiful eco-poetry. The poetry itself is like a forest, growing deep, earthy roots and reaching up to the moon.
Mycocosmic is structured deliciously. Poems are presented quite ordinarily, but then running below them is this beautiful footnote essay about mushrooms. The poems begin to sing back to the essay and the essay sings back to the poems. There is an orchestra of fungi–of roots rooting downward. I get the feeling that the subconscious is being explored. Wheeler writes of this transformation of person into mushroom: “People say I’m reserved, but poems can’t keep secrets” (22).
I suppose my driving question for this review is, “Why mushrooms? Why find solace in mushrooms?” In “The Facilities,” Wheeler writes, “As if anything matters except/the company of birds” (63). The natural world helps us heal. Wheeler ends this poem with this scorchingly lovely phrase, “When you wear/my earrings and they chime/that’s me, looking for a place to go” (63). Death becomes a distant place and the deceased a small chime near the ear. This book is strange and haunting. This book is smart and sad. This book is a universe, a universe of mushrooms, reaching out across the dank soil, transforming grief into thick, rich, earthy: poem.