Rion Levy

Poetry Review 

What We Know So Far Is…
by Connor McDonnell

The universality and ineffability of birth, life, and death, have and continue to be (to no ones surprise) some of the most tempting subjects for the poet. Both like and quite unlike the poet, birth, life, and death are equally important subjects for the physician. But the hospital, the clinic, and the car crash are often not the subjects of verse—at least, not from the physician’s lens.

In a way that is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, Mc Donnell’s most recent book, What We Know So Far Is… examines this coming into being, the being, and the cessation of being in a verse (and at times, prose) that is uniquely medical. Beatific but polished with surgical precision, Mc Donnell expresses what we know so far about what it means to be exist, and what it means when life ends.

He starts, as any good communicator will: with definitions. First, the object: “The dimension of an object is defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any one point within it” (11). Then, of the most prevalent biome: “A communicant viral biome pervades and inhabits everything. As viruses surround us, on us, inside us, in our air, on our pets’ breath, in the lining of our blood vessels, some will extend toward communication and in order to do so such viruses will use animals and species as hosts” (11). Before, of course, the first of a few definitions of madness: “In some circumstances, the host cannot support the geometry of altered language, nor can it tolerate the dissonance foist upon its internal inaudible hum: such that is one way toward inevitable ‘madness,’ intolerance manifest through the host’s inability to communicate effectively with ‘their own kind’ now they straddle the syntax of more than one species” (11). Instead of “celebrat[ing]” (12) this straddling, “we medicate” (12) since “we can’t measure and frame … the accepted definition of a dimension, in this case, the viral dimension” (12). And so, we are left with only what we already know.

The rest of the collection explores this knowing and known limitations of knowledge. He deliberately and radically blends epistemologies —through feeling, through experiencing, through study, and through exploration. But he doesn’t limit himself to what he has come to know through moving through the world. Instead, he regularly relates back to the knowledge that has been passed down, mostly through brief interludes of etymological and medical study. To Mc Donnell, we are not an isolated entity; our knowledge, not an isolated incident. He situates himself throughout the collection in this intersectional space of language, science, mathematics, biology, virology, and the self (in the singular and plural senses of the word).
Perhaps one of the most illustrative passages of Mc Donnell’s thesis lies in Autumn and the harvest. Summed together in the Irish “Fómhar” (15, line 1) Mc Donnell says “Autumn, / you think, Fall, / as in: We harvest what autumns from the trees” (15, lines 2-4). All the while, we

see family huddled at the O.R. door:
their father, an organ donor, …
One word
Harvest
scrawled in sharpie. (18, lines 1-2, 7-9).

Harvest brings life but comes with it the inevitability of death. Decay and rot break down into the fuel for new life. These endings are both blessing and destruction. But, I think it’s the inevitability of it all that brings with it a sense of uneasy peace.

Though Mc Donnell appears mostly whelmed, there is some degree of urgency to his words. “What We Know So Far Is the first steps to madness / … quickly slip into species-specific syntax” (22, lines 1, 3). We, as sentient creatures, act as though our hands are tied between the real, the observable, and the mind. Mc Donnell laments over how those distinctions are very rarely all that clear.

I crack a joke — what we don’t know can’t kill me —
but this is no laughing matter now
(what doesn’t kill me still knows where I live)…

Have you forgotten already how you told me:
this isn’t worth the worry,
most likely, it’s just in my head?..
Do you think cure /will be word or formula? (50, lines 14-16, 19-21, 24-25).

He challenges us to ask for truth and seek the humour from this mess of a guessing game we call science. What We Know So Far Is… seems to argue that there is no one formula for anything, no matter how hard we try to study, categorize, explain, predict, and make sense of things. It’s in this obscurity that both anxiety and beauty lie.

The verses crescendo and decrescendo cyclically.
One calls out across the ocean,
another ushers sky away.
Space is formed in barometer’s forge of pain and a separation.
For those who shed memory of gravity
the cave they project is a portal granting entry to our homes (75, lines 1-5).

Somehow, Mc Donnell captures all of humanity into a mere 85 pages, but he also captures all of speech as well.

Words cower in the long grass of language,
Slip blades of whispered-phrase before striking
When the he[a]rd (ignorant and illiterate)
Is seen and grammatically gored (19, lines 4-7).

Though we meet many figures, both real and created, toward the end of this poem, Mc Donnell leaves us with an aphorism: “suffering explains everything. everything is re-unmade” (82). Despite his apparent nihilism, I perceive an ounce of optimism here. Suffering, though wretched, is an indicator of life. Its’ absence means we have returned again to the earth, contributing and giving way to the next that comes to exist, in whatever form that takes.

Mc Donnell covers a substantial amount of intellectual and poetic ground in What We Know So Far Is…. Though his account is realistic and refrains from sugar coating some of the ugliest of the world—from forest fires to automotive accidents, to the slow takeover of dementia and its impact on families—his account is grounded and refreshing with honesty. He’s told a tale that I think only he could tell.

Such is the cycle of us all as we “re-enter the engine-hum of nature” (83). With and without these truths, we are all doomed to the same ecological fate. Perhaps we should embrace it for what it is. And what it is enough.