Anne Harding Woodworth on Mildred Kiconco Barya

 

The Animals of My Earth School, by Mildred Kiconco Barya, Terrapin Books, 2023.

 

That Mildred Kiconco Barya writes about insects (Insecta), mammals (Mammalia I and II), reptiles (Reptilia), and birds (Aves) in The Animals of My Earth School might make you think she is stepping into the role of nature poet. But she is so much more.

 

She is philosopher, teacher, observer and self-observer, storyteller, dreamer, questioner, and, most of all, learner. Having grown up in Uganda, she imbues her poems with a lush greenery and warmth that must have been with her from childhood and is with her now in the verdant state of North Carolina. Barya welcomes the reader into her Earth School, where together poet and reader are students looking around at their environment, as well as at each other. These poems convey the poet’s curiosity and the reader’s eagerness for close reading.

 

One might say that these poems are reflections of the poet herself, such as in the first poem, “Giant Stag Beetles.” The beetle-stars of the poem stay “up to six years buried”—

 

a spiced life, a long childhood
before pupating and finding a new seduction—lights.

 

Like the beetles, Barya has found the lights. She knows just how to use poetry to see herself reflected in a world of wonder and natural phenomena. This, for a poet who grew up “in a home without mirrors,” as she writes in “Falling in Love,” a poem about wild turkeys that “discovered their own beauty” in the reflectors of the poet’s car.

 

The first section of the book is Insecta. The above-mentioned beetles follow perfectly from the book’s epigraph, an African proverb about grace: “Every beetle is a gazelle in the eyes of its mother.” Inherent in Barya’s poetry, as in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “The Gazelle,” is a consummate grace. When another type of beetle, a ladybug in the poem “Coccinellidae,” senses the poet’s presence, the insect “retracts her legs inside her body like / a turtle. Stops all movement and commands me to be still as well.”

 

This kind of lovely stillness is conveyed in many of Barya’s poems in this book, as it is here in “The Dog is Quiet.”

 

Suddenly, the radiator
comes on forcefully
ejecting heat. Outside,
pounding rain. The dog
that normally barks at
this house is silent, as if
aware that this moment
does not need more din.

 

Interspersed throughout the collection are poems that just had to be prose poems. Certain poems have a way of insisting to their creator that they must be in prose. And when they have accomplished this, the poet knows it could be no other way. That’s the nature of the prose poem. In “Dazzling Wickedness,” the poet met up with a raven that followed her inside a vaulted rock. This narrative is almost a fable and submitted itself inevitably to prose. The unkind raven pursued the poet’s lunch, ate it, and looked for more until it

 

then spun violently and flew outside. Its unkindness so
confounded me that long after I’d left the beach, I remained
tormented by the dazzling wickedness of its powerful gaze.

 

Barya is adept at handling dream and/or at creating a dream-like quality. In “Dream of Lizard Solidarity” from the Reptilia section, the poet is camping alone, having been transformed into a dragon. She confronts a group of monitor lizards—here, in the last two lines of one sestet and the
beginning two of the next.

 

Panic-stricken, I enter their
circle and beg for mercy.

They laugh and tell me
to take life less seriously.

 

That is the poet giving herself advice, albeit in the voice of lizards. Again, one is reminded of Rilke here, when he says in “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” “You must change your life.” Barya is learning something helpful in a dream that will be in a poem that will be in a book that will offer advice to its readers. She does not take the advice to heart for herself, and yet she closes her poem with these witty lines:

I’ve disappointed
humans before.
Now, lizards.

 

In the Aves section, “Little Wren” is also a dream poem, this time, “dream” as in the word “ambition.” One might even think that Barya has invited Emily Dickinson herself into the story of Grandma, who blends into a bird. Her hope, along with the poet’s, becomes almost the thing with feathers. The opening line of the poem addressed to the wren is: “We speak our hope to see you in flight.”

 

Besides the wren, there is an eagle in this poem, which is the vehicle whereby the little wren journeys to become King of Birds. The wren’s voice is Grandma’s voice, as she sleeps perhaps in the car on the journey, her breathing not unlike that of the Volvo’s engine.

 

With you, Grandma has a mouth of bellows
fanning flames for wounded wings to
persist and fight until we get home.

 

Also in Aves, in the poem “Relentless Play: The Nature of Struggle,” “three crows are tormenting a baby / owl, in the pine tree behind my house.” This poem borders on the political, as Barya asks questions about human behavior. She even uses the 14th-century term—parliament—for a group of owls.

 

Eventually, the owl skips to another tree and
all the crows chase after it. Where’s the
parliament of owls to defend the young?
Is this how our children will be betrayed?

 

When the owl moves to the front yard, it is spared because there is a “ground crow, a leader of sorts” in command.

 

In my quiet, I’ve wondered if the birds had
really intended to fight or, were they simply
testing each other’s endurance and will?

 

Clearly, Barya is writing about much more than animals in these delightful, thought-provoking, and well-crafted poems. Through them, she converses with the reader, and their obvious subjects and narratives have much to say, as they explore nature and metaphor. Yes, the animal world is everywhere, and it is there in these poems, but so is humankind. Barya’s craft has spoken. Her words have been chosen. To satisfy or intrigue a reader is one of a poet’s duties, and Barya accomplishes her task beautifully.