Ivy Alvarez

Puya raimondii (Queen of the Andes)

hard sharp retrorse spines accelerate in number nearer the base

the animal (bird, cat) driven to die at its dense rosette

every recurved claw-thorn hooks in corpses difficult to retrieve

cadavers like kestrels, passerines, hawks, blackbirds

is the cat a legitimate pollinator or merely fertilizer?

dissolved nitrogen decomposed sustenance permitted approach

This is one of a group of three poems by Ivy Alvarez about plants that kill animals. I found them in the anthology women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (theenk Books, 2017). [Ivy Alvarez: born in the Philippines, grew up in Tasmania, lived in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and (since 2014) in New Zealand.]

Puya raimondii is a plant of the high Andes and the world's largest bromeliad. It produces a large spherical bobble of spiky leaves, within which the corpses of birds are often found impaled (and sometimes other animals too, such as an unfortunate domestic cat in 1977). The thorns along the edges of the leaves all point inwards, so any struggling creature is inevitably sucked further in, like a spaceship into a black hole; researchers who vainly attempted to extricate the corpses found their own forearms in danger. It seems likely that the plant benefits from added nutrition as the corpses slowly decay. Despite its dangers the plant is frequented by birds. It grows in a landscape where nest sites and perches are in very short supply, and some other aspects of the plant's architecture are well adapted to satisfying these needs; but mistakes are fatal. [Information from the interesting 2011 paper by William E. Rees and Nicholas A. Roe: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237160959_Puya_raimondii_Pitcairnioidae_Bromeliaceae_and_birds_a_hypothesis_on_nutrient_relationships .]

Puya raimondii in flower in Ayacucho, Peru

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

The other poems are about the pitcher plants (Nepenthes) and the birdcatcher tree (Pisonia grandis); the latter is a tree of tropical oceanic coasts, much used by seabirds for nesting. Its sticky, thorny fruits are spread by becoming attached to the birds' feathers; too many fruits and the bird becomes unable to fly.


*

Ivy Alvarez has published several books that I long to immerse myself in. One is the violent verse novel Disturbance (2013), based on a factual and too-familiar kind of domestic tragedy. Another is The Everyday English Dictionary (2016). Here are some extracts from the letter X, taken from her website:




xanthic:

in the little white box

a cousin on a satin pillow

my question              ‘what’s jaundice?’

hangs                         an uncertain balloon




xanthous:

no raven-haired heroines

in fairytales





xerotes:

fruit bat                                sugar-seeker

tongue-tip dabber of sweetness

deliberate crumb-pincher of crystals

alchemist of dry habit           dissolving into moist reward



......


xyster:

it comes when I am unconscious

scraping music from my bones

a cricket’s song




Yes, it's a dictionary. But a journey too; I got a broader sense of it from Jennifer MacBain-Stephen's review for Agape Editions:

https://bloggingthenuminous.com/2017/12/19/blurring-the-edge-of-the-tiniest-things-a-review-of-ivy-alvarezs-the-everyday-english-dictionary/



But the Ivy Alvarez book I most want to read is her latest collection, which also has dictionary qualities. The poems in Diaspora: Volume L (2019) are arabesques that take off from common Filipino expressions. Here's one example, sourced from https://verityla.com/2018/06/29/poems-from-diaspora-ivy-alvarez/ :




*Lamang-kati


Asseveration is natural to me.
A machete, too — blackness
bonding to metal like rust.
I’ve seen blood on dirt.
It doesn’t hurt.


The first time I heard the words
dog’s breakfast, it made sense to me.
Things can get so messy
only a dog would eat it up.


The meat market’s wash and slurry,
my feet brown with storm water,
the aisles lined with heads, limbs:
a wedding I never knew.


Let’s not make a hash of love —
we don’t know how it ends,
what the shore looks like after hard rain,
the sea disgorging its contents.


*Filipino idiom meaning meat of butchered animals (literally, contents of low tide)





This volume (which covers the letter L) is theoretically just the first of 19, but I take that with a pinch of salt. IA circles round her wide, dark and tender domain but she strikes me as an artist, like Claude Debussy, who would rather grow pineapples in the bedroom than repeat herself.


Natalie Linh Bolderston has written an inspiring review of Diaspora: Volume L for Harana Poetry:

https://www.haranapoetry.com/iii19-review-diaspora-volume-l-ivy-

In the course of which she quotes some lines from"Lálabasán" [ability or intelligence, literally "something will come out"]  that I can't resist retweeting here:





to be told

I am an adjective

does not make me

that adjective

no matter how complimentary

or inflationary the adjective

Ivy Alvarez

[Image source: https://verityla.com/2018/06/29/poems-from-diaspora-ivy-alvarez/ .]