In Old Sky: Poems Inspired by the Grand Canyon by Lauren Camp
Grand Canyon Conservatory, 2024
Review by Sara Stoudt
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What do poets and scientists have in common? Wonder. Both poetry and science provide an invitation to question, experiment, investigate, pursue knowledge. Like a lab notebook meets an artist’s book, Lauren Camp’s In Old Sky is a mix of images from the Grand Canyon and accompanying text. These poems document, if not fully explain, what she witnessed during her stint as the Grand Canyon Conservancy’s Astronomer in Residence.
Throughout these poems there is a theme of having to look to see. Camp’s poems show how observing is not always passive, but can also involve active participation and a physical excursion into the environment. In the poem “No Other Place to Go” Camp tells us what it was like to sit on a bench “…watching night / move into place” contrasting it with more complicated life outside the park: “Simple, such looking without / having to notice.” “Plate Tectonics,” a poem that grapples with the making of the canyon geologically, ends with “…I never know what to see / of the world but all the force / still acting on it.” In “Tiny Plot,” Camp describes a moment where the seeing became second nature: “Did I stop / trying to see, and if so, when?” continues on to “I remember meticulous detail I knew / not to look to find.” Yet “Tonight the Sky Breathes” reminds us that the seer is not the only one with agency: “I will see / what will let me see…”
This theme of seeing even appears in others’ words in “Look Up, Look Out, Look Infinite,” a collective poem based on responses by visitors to the Grand Canyon National Park that is organized by the phases of the moon. Camp provided prompts, visitors responded to them anonymously by dropping notes into collection boxes spread throughout the Grand Canyon Conservancy spaces, and Camp then collaged them together, in a cento of sorts. In the “Waxing Crescent” section of this poem a visitor responds to a “tonight I will” prompt: “Tonight / I will see in the absence of light.” In the “New Moon” section a visitor notices: “We often forget to look up.” This watching, noticing, often passive in connotation in other works, here realizes the physicality of the witnessing.
Her attentive observation takes the form of literal field work at times. In “The Dawn Was Full of Water” Camp describes her trek down into the canyon: “We have all done something hard / and alone, in impossible / dark.” Facts and evidence are collected along with the wonder. In the poem “Inner Planets” Camp laments
how so often we are given to evidence
the dark robs us
of hope, and we can’t see that it isn’t that
we need to see.
The poem “Plate Tectonics” accepts that “…the sky is busy / marking tomorrow’s / facts.” But there is also an acknowledgement of what isn’t there, what can’t be seen or communicated, as coined in “No Other Place to Go”: “the missing data of the impossibly vast.”
Even amongst all this noticing and record-keeping, Camp knows it can’t all be told, and that’s okay. In “Arena” the sky is the main character: “The sky is so good / at knowing how to be endless.” The single line, title-less poem found later in the collection could just as easily follow: “You could see so little and within it, just enough.”And in fact, not everything can even be seen. Darkness is its own character in this work with the Grand Canyon setting as a balm against the light pollution we may face in our own surroundings. “86 Light-Years Away” takes us far away to meet darkness: “Dark builds / its boundaries. Settles at the bottom then vastly above. / In the middle, a jewel blue stripe. On it goes, / mitering in.” “I Carry It All Inside” re-imagines dark’s boundaries as empty pockets,
… I have taken a path
away from our human
light frenzy.
… Get back
to life’s other
vibrations. Lose
what I found
in the sky’s empty pockets.
The missing and the hidden also have a place in this collection. Erasure and erosion come up in “History of History,” “…the biggest / erasure. In that space mouthing leftover / pricks of potential…” as well as in “The Very Removing,” “an index of presence that continues eroding.” These themes of erasure and erosion remind us of what used to be that now isn’t there and what we must experience for ourselves rather than read about, perhaps before it is too late. What isn’t there comes up in “Terminus of Presence,” “I was home / in the invisibility… The people taking / photographs stopped because after all / they could see only the prologue / of nothing.” and in “To Navigate,” “The sky continues / to arrange / its inert absence”.
And despite all of the pictures, the descriptions, the recounting of adventure, trying to make us feel like we are there with her, Camp knows that we will ultimately have to go see for ourselves. In an interview she outlines the audience she had in mind while writing:
people who had either been to the Grand Canyon and loved it and had now gone back to
wherever it is they live and hold those memories in their mind or people who had never been
who hold it as a place, as a destination, people who have never seen pristine darkness, who don’t
know what it’s like to stand beside a place of such tremendous history, both in the canyon, and
above it.
Camp holds space for us all to be observers, adventurers, poets even, while showing us the benefits of paying attention to the world around us and embracing the vastness of darkness. With this return to our own memories and anticipation of future journeys in mind, the collection has an appropriate end to its last poem, “Open the Tireless Sky”: “There was no final sentence.”
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New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024). She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute.
Sara Stoudt is a statistician, teacher, and writer from Pennsylvania. She is the co-author of Communicating with Data: The Art of Writing for Data Science and a member of the editorial team for the Future of Data Science and Our Environment creative data anthologies. Her other non-academic writing can be found in The Pudding and on the Cover Me blog among others.
ID: Cover of In Old Sky by Lauren Camp.
Psaltery & Lyre 