AFTER NAMING THE ANIMALS

Ungar’s latest collection of poetry ponders time, fauna, and mortality.

Human beings have never lived longer than they do now, and they’ve never spent so much of their lives worrying about aging—often at the expense of what else time takes away. The speakers in Ungar’s poems are largely fixated on time and its related topics: memory, change, and most pointedly, loss. Rather than exalt in the wisdom one accrues by living, many of the works here lament the havoc that our species has wreaked on the planet and what could disappear as a result. The opening section, “Shattered Vessels” is bleak, treading into the psychological effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and human hubris. “What to do with this dread?” she writes in “Average Monkey,” a poem about human waste killing various species and human beings’ inability to see the true scale of the world and “Take the long view.” Ungar ushers readers into this perspective in the book’s middle section—a collection of elegies for endangered species that range from Cuban hummingbirds to chameleons to blue sea dragons. Although these poems have a clear tone of reverence, there’s also quiet fury; these are not the lilting narratives of David Attenborough, but condemnations of human destruction. Earth lost 22 species in 2021, one poem points out: “They were our little sisters and brothers / whether we ever met or called their names.” Some of Ungar’s most visceral work honors these often-obscure creatures and their legacies. The book’s closing section shifts its focus back to homo sapiens and its latent cruelty. The poems feature slivers of calm and hope in small acts of kindness and, curiously, a sense of relief in realizing that the planet will go on after humans are gone.

A poetic chiaroscuro of grief over a planet and society in peril.