A REVIEW OF ALYSE BENSEL’S RARE WONDROUS THINGS: A POETIC BIOGRAPHY OF MERIA SIBYLLA MERIAN
Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Meria Sibylla Merian, Alyse Bensel. Green Writers Press, 2020. 80 pages. $14.95.
by Reuben Gelley Newman
Encapsulating the life of a 17th-century naturalist in 80 pages of verse is no easy task, and North Carolina-based poet Alyse Bensel rises to the challenge spectacularly in her debut collection, Rare Wondrous Things. Bensel’s extensive research on Merian, a groundbreaking German-born scientist and artist, bears fruit in poem after poem, ranging from ekphrastic lyrics to meditations on Merian’s family life. Rare Wondrous Things offers a feminist biography that gleams with imagery and breaks through the tangle of history, chronicling how Merian herself broke out of the constraints put upon her as an early modern female naturalist. “I rearrange / these fragments into a legacy, / where I can breathe life / into so many blank pages,” says the speaker of “Kerkestraat” (54), and with a musician’s ear and a historian’s touch, Bensel achieves just that in these deft, daring poems.
In perhaps the collection’s most clever formal move, the speaker of these poems seems like a composite of Merian and the poet herself. From the very first poem, “Dear Esteemed Art-Loving Reader,” Bensel nods toward the modern reader even as the epigraph quotes Merian’s introduction to her 1783 Caterpillar Book: “Do not, dear reader, let the pleasure of your eyes be spoiled; judge not too quickly, but read me from beginning to end” (3). That dictum falls both to the poet-researcher, paging through the naturalist’s catalogues of insects, and to a reader of Rare Wondrous Things.
Judging slowly, then, from beginning to end: such is my task as a reviewer, and like life, the book follows no simple organization. Unlike other recent poetic biographies, such as Ruth Padel’s Beethoven: A Life in Poems and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis, Bensel eschews section breaks, capturing a natural fluidity of narrative in verse. Early poems, like “Apprentice, 1659,” chronicle Merian’s youth and art in precise, imagistic language, before changing course in “Glossary for Metamorphosis I,” a stunning gloss for scientific terms Merian uses in her work.
In “Apprentice,” the speaker observes a young Merian who “struggled to paint veined leaves, / where language failed to describe / the exact mottled design” (5). But if language fails as a form of description, where does that leave the poet? “Glossary for Metamorphosis I,” along with a second gloss a few poems later, unfolds in shimmering prose segments, attesting to the power of language to describe scientific transformation:
silberlinge. A chrysalis the color of silver or mother of pearl.
A piece of silver clinging to a stem. You are a pendant
burnished and kept in a silk-lined drawer, never feeling
the hollow of my neck.
(11)
The metamorphosis of a caterpillar, central to Merian’s work and these poems, parallels the naturalist’s push beyond her “domestic duties” to her husband toward what others called the “unseemly, immoderate ambition” of scientific research (13). If “Domestic” relates how she builds a house “free of escaped insects” to suit her husband’s desires (13), then “Housewife” distills Merian’s frustration with this housebound life. “I’m spent on the oven / coals, radiant heat,” the speaker reflects, before concluding that “a magnifying glass / will let me learn / everything concealed / within my own flesh, / trembling to erupt” (19).
What does erupt is nothing short of revelatory, both in Merian’s life and Bensel’s poetry. Bensel conjures crystalline instructions “to kill a butterfly quickly,” and the exquisite violence of such an act becomes a method of preservation. This seemingly unethical killing serves to “keep each / rare, wondrous thing / and have it never fade from sun // in its now still sanctuary” (23). This creative mission reads as both Merian’s and Bensel’s, and the phrase “rare, wondrous thing” is actually a quote from Merian’s letters. Once again, poet meets naturalist in the vibrant space of the poem.
The collection continues with an expansive range of epistolary, lyric, and ekphrastic poems, taking the reader toward various locations in the early modern Dutch empire. An excellent sequence portrays Merian’s resentment toward her husband while residing with her daughters at a colony of religious separatists in Friesland. In “Maria at the Labadist Colony,” her isolation leads to a searching, silent piety as the artist “flickers from verse to what crawls / inch by inch rooted without the need to speak” (34).
Soon after, Bensel turns to Merian’s years spent studying insects in Suriname, a Dutch colony where she traveled — without her husband — in 1699. For Merian, Suriname is a place with a natural “power beyond men’s control,” an exoticized landscape where she dreams she’ll find “blue morphos in humid forests / and Amazonian women pierced with bone” (40). Aware of the brutal legacy of settler colonialism, Bensel quotes Merian’s observation that the Native peoples of Suriname “are not well treated in their servitude of the Dutch” before the haunting “As They Are.” The poem doesn’t delve deeply into colonial oppression, but it starkly depicts Indigenous methods of abortion alongside Merian’s own experience of motherhood: “I’ve seen how those born starve beside their mothers. // I’ve seen excess and known myself lacking” (45).
Here the poems become more formally inventive, as well. While most of the poems are straightforward one-page lyrics, now we have fragmented beauties like “scale wing” (42) and “Fever,” at five pages the longest poem in the book, a tour-de-force portraying Merian’s affliction by tropical heat. “I long for my cocoon / gauzy and imperfect” (46), the poem begins, describing in almost religious terms the treatment Merian undergoes as she becomes one with “this incessant need / to live in this caterpillar body” (49).
Illness wracked Merian after her return to Europe in 1701, where she settled for the rest of her life in Amsterdam, continuing her work until her death in 1717. “First and Final Portrait,” a tender ekphrastic inspired by a painting by her son-in-law, George Gsell, beautifully describes a Maria “stoic in old age”: “The scarlet ibis merely recedes. / A common moth dives behind the drapery. // In your overstuffed study, you gesture / to somewhere else, to anywhere but here” (58).
That gesture finds its way to Bensel herself, and the collection ends by describing how researching Merian has changed the speaker’s view of modern life. The delightfully quirky sonnet “21st Century Domestic” contains my favorite insect image of the whole book (and there are many insect images). The poem describes a woman who raises moths as “squirming children,” when one day “she opens the closet / to find the wedding dress eaten whole: // the moths drunk with silk, satiated / and ready to depart these crumbling walls” (60). Indeed, the domestic as a setting “crumbles” within these poems, leaving a brilliant, wild world of feminist artistry and science.
Despite the collection’s lush beauty, I found myself wishing for more structure. Rare Wondrous Things is not meant to tell every detail of Merian’s life, and nor should it, but setting changes and life trajectories occasionally took me by surprise. The shift to and from Suriname, for instance, felt abrupt, as did the turn to the 21st century. Inevitably, I found myself turning to Wikipedia in addition to Bensel’s helpful notes section, and I was disappointed at not getting a clear picture of Merian’s death.
Yet perhaps that’s the point: recovering history requires work on part of the poet and the reader. As Merian herself writes, it takes “hard and costly journey” to discover “wondrous, rare things,” and I am immensely grateful that Bensel went on such a journey in Rare Wondrous Things, taking us readers along with her in these exquisite, captivating poems.
Reuben Gelley Newman (he/him) is a writer and musician currently based in Williamstown, MA. His work is available or forthcoming in diode poetry journal, DIALOGIST,and Hobart Pulp,among others. A recent graduate of Swarthmore College, he was a Fall 2020 intern at Copper Canyon Press. Check out his website (bit.ly/3pPZEh9) or Twitter (@joustingsnail).