Reviewed by Donna Fleischer
Mycocosmic: Poems
by Lesley Wheeler
Wiley
April 2025, Paperback: 82 pages, ISBN-13 : 978-1961209169
Lesley Wheeler’s first poem, “We Could Be”, is a visionary ode, tender in the way it asks herself and all of us to gather our mistakes about us / . . . mistakes gorgeous in dispersal / across polluted skies. Help me try. // This effort will be for nothing less than a human transformation through synthesis with the mycelial. The book epigraphs words from the Chinese-American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “. . . the uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift — and a guide — when the controlled world we thought we had fails.” The poems of metamorphoses that follow invoke, chant, tribulate, imagine, and roar in sinewy lyrics. Wheeler transforms step by step, as did Dante, through descent in “Dark Energy”:
Root-brain speculates into / soil, hyphae nosing toward /
rot, digesting that we are manystranded / & one-bodied, /
the ten thousand sexes of our / fungal computer penetrating
rock & plant & cloud & animal or / becoming indistinguishable
from / what was called individual, fed ideas & feeding them
back, / symbiotic now whether or not / we notice kindness
fruiting. . . //
The last poem, in tercets, “Return Path”, brings us full circle; we return to earth’s mantle, feet first, having felt the unity inherent in these poems, a unity once so in art and science, as well as the interdependencies among all organic and inorganic forms, above, on, and below earth’s surfaces. We follow the poet who now prays with her feet, invoking love in the final stanza: / Not that earth loves me, exactly. Matter’s what / matters. She wants me to return the mess / of my only body, pray from head through feet / as I sink, unthinking ash, into love’s circuit. //.
How we accept Wheeler’s invitation to begin anew is through poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “suspension of disbelief” as we review basic scientific facts, that: ocean plants cellularly fused with fungi into the Plant Kingdom; the symbiont is a body that transports billions of other life forms; the mycorrhiza of symbionts (symbiosis) among fungus and plant groupings and around the roots of trees form the mycelium or mycelial network of fungi fruiting into mushroom; and from Wheeler, in a poetic footnote, we learn that pyrophile plants, or pyrophytes, require fire to complete their reproductive cycle. Taxonomic orders of the plant and animal kingdoms estimate the fungi kingdom to number over 140,000 species. The Western world’s natural philosophy unity of science, art, and theology, split apart by the Enlightenment, renews in this poetry.
Wheeler brings us on her family’s Gran Torino station wagon childhood camping trips just off the New Jersey parkway; along the way she introduces her sister, controlling father, too early marriage, her baby, new partner, and a mother in terminal care. “The Underside of Everything You’ve Loved” incants poet H. D.’s tribute to Freud and the unconscious stirrings within her while / I wrote a senior thesis on Adrienne Rich’s metaphors / /; like Rich, she also was ‘diving into the wreck’ of her married life.
The fire that will bring new life ignites in “Venus / Dodo” when the poet visits a museum to discover that just beneath the floor where extinct birds are viewed, she discovers what she calls the “misnamed” Venus of Willendorf — a faceless, woman-made, excavated, anonymous, small female of big breasts and belly — the sculpture embodies and proves the existence of wholebodymindfeeling for the poet ‘s transfiguring journey through the building up and tearing down evolutionary forces. She experiences an intuition beyond knowing in the presence of this pre-historical figure.
The fire continues burning. “It Is Advantageous to Place on the Table a [Hollow Figurine] of Apollo, with Bibliomancy” brilliantly enjambs each line of charm or spell handed from one angry woman to the next; “Divination” is a kit and caboodle chant list for steering according to a ‘nowhere map’ because our journey starts off in destruction and fans out, in, up, and down, through the senses to new possibilities; “Tone Problem” centers and tempers the destroyingcreating fires with mention in the last line of / The outrageous auxiliary verb: may be. //
Wheeler’s ideas synthesize unusual word groupings; from these combinations new qualities emerge, such as unpredictably jarring, sometimes funny internal and end rhymes, line breaks, and punctuation, not unlike the way speakers of a language are able to generate an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of syntactical rules. As her style destabilizes it opens readers’ individual and collective consciousness. The Japanese artist, Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), originated a series of 219 ink on paper sheets, during Japan’s Edo period from 1842 to 1843, entitled Daily Sketches for Exorcism and Longevity, depicting lion-dogs and humans as lion dancers. Lesley Wheeler’s book also synthesizes some Eastern concepts, practices, and beliefs in even rocks being alive! for to imagine intersexed interspecies becoming! as Shintoism waves to Animé, as Wheeler surprises us into wonder.
About the reviewer: Donna Fleischer (b. 1950, USA), is a poet, essayist, and curatorial blogger at word pond.