davidkm

Beatty, Greg, 2007, Phrases of the Moon: Spec-12, Spec House of Poetry, www.spechouseofpoetry.com, $5, saddle-stitched chapbook, not paginated, 100 copies. Cover illustration by Johannes Hevelius, originally published in 1647.

If I have counted right there are 20 poems in this chapbook, of which six were previously published. The introduction is by Robin Mayhall. The theme is this: all poems purport to have been written by lunar poets, some of them visiting Earth for the first time, some still on the moon. Travel influences one's view of the world and therefore the direction of one's writing, and travel from one celestial body to another would surely have a dramatic effect. Oh, and one of the poems won the Rhysling award in 2005.

One of my favorites is "Fear in the Mud Room:"


losing points, slipping transitions as
my pulse racing, my hands slap
for autopatching mechs
to plug inevitable outflux
that needs not be plugged


One of those differences that you won't expect but that will make a lasting impression when you visit a different world for the first time.

Many of these poems leaving me thinking "but what about..." From "Lunar Beach:"


it's ice not sun we seek,
daring airless certain death on shingles
more naked than home world ever knew.


About 4 billion years ago the earth must have been much like the moon. Though it did have liquid water, there was no one to see or drink it. No, the difference is what happened since. If the moon gets life, we will take it there, and it will only be earth life all over again. (Albeit continually adapting to new environments, as it always does.)

This book is, in part, about that adaptation. It focuses on people, not on the species that may go with us when we leave this world (rats, bacteria, cockroaches, et cetera), but we are who we care about the most anyway. Never mind the people who love pets. Beatty doesn't talk about them, yet I think it will make a big difference to who chooses to go and to the emotional well-being of the moon dwellers. There will be pet rocks aplenty, but that's cold comfort.

The book ends with the poem that won the Rhysling: "No Ruined Lunar City."


There are no domes cracked
by random meteorites,
leaving homes below exposed--
dead and full of surprised dead.

...

There are no empty spacesuits,
their linings dry and cracked
from decades without air.


This collection succeeds as a sort of miniature scrapbook of lunar life and death. As Robin Mayhall says in the introduction, "an arc of lunar colonization, hopeful building, brief success and tragic ending is repeated" in many of these poems. We need to think about what life will be like when we begin to colonize the rest of the solar system. We need to be prepared for challenges other than technical. Beatty is not the first writer to try to answer some of these questions, but he carries my thoughts a little farther than they have yet gone along pathways that terrans might be walking in the next few decades. And I think the title shows that is what he intended to do. There are more poems to write before we write them from the moon.