You know me,” writes Debora Greger in “To a Glass Lizard,” “packing to cross an ocean/ in search of something/ overlooked in my backyard.”
Indeed, much of the work gathered in In Darwin’s Room, Greger’s tenth book of poems, ranges far afield in quest of something elusive that may be hidden close to home. In this rich collection, Greger travels in space and time, circling what feels like a central emptiness or enigma.
The closer she ventures to the recent deaths of her parents—In Darwin’s Room is dedicated to their memories—the more individual the voice in the poems becomes, and the more intriguing the exploration of early memories of family and education.
Loss, though, is the predominant theme throughout In Darwin’s Room. Although it’s most piercingly expressed in the poems (two of which have “elegy” in their titles) in the second section of this book, in fact loss is omnipresent in this collection. The last of the three epigraphs to the book is Thomas Hardy’s reflection that “What we gain by science is, after all, sadness.” “To a Glass Lizard” ends: “Lizard, don’t move. Don’t break./ Let me/ disappear into the underbrush/ of everyday loss.”
Many of Greger’s poems are decidedly not “everyday”—they are scholarly explorations of Darwin’s journals, of various books and museums and their contents, from Darwin’s microscope to a shirt from ancient Egypt. Greger is the first poet-in-residence at the Harn Museum of Art; she is a visual
