"Beauty abounds even as the world burns." Steph Catudal's resolute first poetry collection, Radicle, offers hope of renewal despite burnout, bereavement, and fear.
The poems fall into three sections representing stages in a plant's life: "Germinate," "Grow," and "Anchor." Sarah Kellogg's black-and-white illustrations depict the step-by-step development of a juniper from seed to mature tree. A radicle is the root of a plant embryo, but it's no accident that it's a homophone of "radical." Catudal bravely confronts her worries for her daughters and the wider world. "Peacebuilder" reads, in its entirety, "how do I tell my daughter/ there's peace to be found when/ her body is/ the battleground." "Hollow Bones" opens with the image of a hen gathering her chicks under her wings. Catudal extends the maternal protective instinct "to keep them safe, sheltered/ in this wicked world" to the strife of modern war zones, thinking of "the mother and/the mattress she/ pulls over her children/ as the mortar crumbles,/ futile against phosphorescent rain."
Nature imagery brings majestic landscapes to life. "Saudade" and "hiraeth" (connoting homesickness and longing in Portuguese and Welsh, respectively) lend their names to wistful verses. Catudal's previous memoir, Everything All at Once, chronicled her father's and first husband's deaths from cancer. While "wondering/ who would I be if/ cancer hadn't eaten/ my family," she redeems the grief by planting "iris and poppy atop the ash/ to remind myself/ something beautiful/ still lives inside these ruins."
Alive to nuance and suffering, these poems affirm goodness and rejuvenation. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck