In November 2023, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released its Fifth National Climate Assessment, and rather than start the report with some dishwater-dull bureaucratic balderdash, they turned to then-Poet Laureate Ada Limon for a fresh assessment. Her resulting poem, “Startlement,” lends its title to the latest collection of her work, which includes 21 previously uncollected poems.
As America’s 24th Poet Laureate, Limon enjoys some pretty heady company, including Louise Gluck and Rita Dove. She’s also one of a comparative few to have had her work launched into space (“In Praise of Mystery,” which was engraved on the side of NASA’s Europa Clipper, and also published in picture book form).
Startlement gathers excerpts from Limon’s first six volumes, and if the evolution of her style over the last couple of decades seems subtle, it might be due to her old-soul observationalism having emerged fully formed from the start. As the poet herself says in 2005’s “The Echo Sounder,” “She enters the world a ready-set-go girl.”
Limon’s work in many ways recalls that of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, rooted as it is in nature. (In fact, Limon included Oliver’s “Can You Imagine?” as one of the seven site-specific installations of You Are Here: Poetry in Parks, her signature project as Poet Laureate.) The inward-feeling, outward-seeking character of her writing reflects more of a harmony than a tension, a sort of yin and yang in rough balance. In “The Vulture & the Body,” as she hopes to engage her doctor on the subject of duality, she remarks “how lately, it’s enough to be reminded that my / body is not just my body, but that I’m made of old stars.”
In the collection’s aforementioned final poem, “In Praise of Mystery,” Limon links the deep-in-here to the way-out-there with the philosophical grace of Marvel’s Silver Surfer: “O second moon, we, too, are made / of water, of vast and beckoning seas. / We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, / of a need to call out through the dark.”
Limon’s humanity doesn’t just leap off the page, it reaches out to enfold us in a warm and welcome embrace.
