"Looking Through Stone": poetry and the eco-text

There is in poet Susan Ioannou's Looking Through Stone an interesting development of the idea of the poem as 'stone' that makes it a " both solid and beautiful" undertaking. But it's more than simply a collection of poetry, or a typology of stone poems (as the book is divided about equally between the geological and mythical-folklorish): she offers the reader an even interestingly wider window on ecology in general. If the ecological is not a gratuitous personal preference it's because treating Ioannou's text as both poetry and a type of environmental activism is the best way to reach through to its literary 'stone' heart. Ioannou's is an eco-text. For all its poetic and mythical richesse, there are also the "horror stories" of disease, human exploitation and environmental mismanagement that have to be chronicled in verse, too.

And nowhere does the heart of the eco-text emerge more clearly, introducing subject and environmentalist attitude, than in the "Prologue" piece, "Why" (13),

Why fondle a rock?

It shares the rugged body

where we were born

Our passionate shift and shove

mirror a moment

erupting in fire

slowed to eons' crystalline trickle

thickening, building

collapsing, melting.

Great ages echo and shiver,

playing themselves out

within our puny bones.

where poet treats the subject 'rock' not just as mineral but literary origin of the human and animal in us: from earth's outer "rugged body" through to its "erupting" and "thickening" core. Earth is no sterile moon landscape: apart from its purely figurative associations, the planet is literally ours as both quintessential rocky place and repository of our own puny natures. That's why the rock can be fondled as it though it literally sprang from us: "It shares the rugged body/where we were born".

And if the 'Prologue' gives poetic object, the 'Epilogue' is the place to introduce the "Petrologist" (104-5), chronicler and conveyor of stone history, whose "instrument is intuition" (104) and primary tools the drill, pick and maps with which to begin looking through to stone's ineffable heart. Everything in between, Parts I to IV, is that unearthing of stone's twin scientific and mythic natures, with the concomitant stories of mineral exploration and exploitation. The petrologist shares in the myth-maker's sense of awe at this crib of Love and Death that is the Earth:

In sunlight, one by one,

he lays out his stones,

loving their tints,

silky or ragged faces.

He fondles, speaks to them,

wonders when they will whisper back

where each formed,

what it grated against,

where some day it would go. (105)

Believing that the "inanimate is prickly with soul" ("Mineralogy Lesson" 33)poet is perhaps earth-mother herself to her son's coldly dispassionate scientist; her "murmur of mysteries" (33) to his ions and diffusion Not that there is every any consistent dialectic of feminine and masculine throughout, nor is Ioannou suggesting that male attitudes towards the earth are exploitative in nature, but the reader can't help sensing that, inside the poetic classifications, lies a need to restore 'stone' to a kind of pre-scientific, paleolithic purity. The analysis of stone in poetry works in just this double lyrical-environmentalist vein, as a way perhaps for the author to help the scientist son to look for a truer meaning in the "minerals' hum" and "fissures and dust" ("He Sits" 36). The story of 'stone' the poet wants to tell threatens everywhere to be obscured by the very scientific technology that makes that story possible.

At the beginning rock has not just being but a name, "Petra" (15),: images of her abound as "a breathing, magical, loved stone" who's "spiky as bornite" or "lethal as molten gold". Able to listen for its pulse with a magnetometer ("Geologist" 16), the geologist can feel the 'stone's' "attractions and repulsions" ("Magnetometrist" 19); and compass needles swing wildly sometimes because there are traces of ancient solar bombardments the planet carries inside like subconscious trauma, ("Exceptions" 17). Stone is a live organism with wildly pulsing inner chambers and a dark primal neolithic Ur-mind. It's a magnificent resilient structure on its own but, Ionnou suggests, it can also be wounded, scarred.

Petra has not just body, made out of elemental clay ("Clay" 80) but soul, one "invisible anima" ("The Link" 22) that lives in all marine and terrestrial eco-systems. The heart of her is true but passionate to the extreme. If she could write her own poem, the "Earth's poem, unspoken/thick with her possibilities" ("Geode" 31) it would describe a pure love of "melting groundwater ("Sedimentary Rock" 27) or even picture its sorrows as a "pyromaniac's dream" ("Devitrify" 24), "cracked open", and rupturing into lava or the scaly geode. She is a book of myths, too, telling how shy Diana was "hardened to stone" ("Amethyst" 66) or garnet originally "petrified from goddess Isis' blood" ("Garnet" 68).

Petra, old as sidereal time, is subject of a veritable Ages of Stone every bit the equal of Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Minerals thunder out of the skies, dropping down as "metal of heaven": limonite, magnetite, hematite ("The Metal of Heaven: Iron (Fe)" 41), rich Promethean gifts. All the known elements: iron, copper, and silver, gold, mercury, lead and tin—all are facets of the one Petra, each etymologically distinct and each bearing uniquely the special qualities and powers received from her. She's personified as oracle ("Oracle Stones"61),of pure gem light ("Gem Lure") and time "that vibrates at 30,000 cycles per second" ("Lithotherapy", 64).The "blue-eyed geologist" maker her Northern pilgrimages to her("Prospector"83-85), an interesting type of the feminine-explorer more attuned to poet's own mythical sensitivities.

But pilgrimages aside, and dispassionate scientific inquiry and appreciation, there are the "Horror Stories" (96-99) to consider. Not all things excavated out of the earth resonate with poetic and mythological meaning: for oftentimes mountains trickle down their acid poisons ("Iron Mountain" 96), holes gape in the landscape wide enough to "swallow the CN Tower" ("Hole" 97), and diseases like silicosis ("Silicosis" 98) and radiation poison ("Prophecy" 98-99) quietly develop for years without detection Poetic elixirs have become toxins that pose real threats to the environment.