The Consciousness of Earth -- Reviewed by Michael R. Burch

The Consciousness of Earth is a book-length blank verse poem by Esther Cameron. Joseph Salemi has called it a "staggeringly ambitious and powerfully conceived philosophical epic of great scope." Hadassah Haskale has called it "A white whale of a book!" I agree with both Salemi and Haskale, and so I’d like to look at the poem first as a "philosophical epic" and then as a "white whale."

The Consciousness of Earth is not an epic based merely on length: it meets what I perceive as the formalist poet’s formal criteria. It has unity of plot; a sharp-eyed, sharp-witted, often sharp-tongued narrator who speaks in heroic meter; a titular protagonist who, like Ceridwen, takes various shapes, and evolves quite mysteriously; an archenemy who might simply be called "Unthinkingness" (unlike Milton, Cameron refuses to allow her Adversary to appear in any way attractive; she is squarely and forthrightly on the earth’s side, and I laud and applaud her for it); an epic struggle (the struggle for earth itself); and a chorus of voices: of religion, science, history, philosophy, politics, economics, art, literature and poetry.

Cameron’s erudition, research and depth of thought shine through page after page. She is both poet and philosopher, and her scope is indeed great, and far beyond the scope of this review. She begins with the origins of matter and life, leads us ably through the development of the human consciousness, then proceeds to postulate and argue just as ably for a larger, greater consciousness – The Consciousness of Earth. Her words are, in the main, so full of knowledge, intelligence, common sense, pith, wisdom and poetry (such a delightfully rare, dare I say "sexy," sextet!) that her more striking ideas–-or are they merely fancies?–-seem wonderfully plausible. While I don’t find myself agreeing with her conclusion–-as I understand (or misunderstand) it–-that the last best hope of earth lies in men and women group-thinking earth’s way out of the morass-ish mess it finds itself in, led by poets, I sincerely applaud Cameron’s effort and her art.

In the end, The Consciousness of Earth strikes me as a lovely poem, a lovely thought, and probably closer to religion than to philosophy, as it requires a good deal of faith to be embraced in its entirety. Plato anted up the philosopher-king. Cameron trumps him with the poet tribunal. But it seems to me that the least likely people to save the world are philosophers and poets. Both seem quite adept at dirty-laundry-listing the world’s faults, without being able to do much in the way of suggesting, much less implementing, workable workaday solutions. Moreover, none of the many poets I know strike me as saviors of themselves, much less of the world. Cameron might be the exception. Two thousand years ago a wise man who "practiced what he preached" told us we ought to love others as we love ourselves ... whereupon the religious leaders and politicians of his day had him crucified. Can we now save the earth by merely thinking better, in more tightly knit circles, or only and simply by living and loving better? It seems to me that we already know how to save the earth, but we simply refuse to do so. We’d rather kill the messenger that hear the sane, sure truth.

Fortunately, we don’t have to agree with poets to fall in love with their words and visions. And there is indeed much to fall in love with here. Many readers will find themselves mysteriously drawn to Cameron’s "white whale" of a poem. While here and there the poetry bogs down a bit (as it invariably must in a book-length poem) albeit only to the level of very good prose, there are many moments of sheer elevation. I have underlined a large number of lines for "re-harpooning" later. Lines like:

See how the brain-pan’s grown

mind itself a shimmer / in the synapses’ evanescent web

Aurochs, rhinoceros / and mammoth loom with intimated bulk / yet light, cloudlike almost

who shall teach us what the graceful / gestures are

Then let us see, if seeing can be borne

True, deep unease attends upon a dream of peace / enthroned upon judicious use of force

Therefore into the gap between great need / and action’s impotence, defiance crept

There are a goodly number of passages that make me smile for the poetry while simultaneously blinking at the depth of perception and thought, so that I must look as if I’m flirting with the poem. I probably am!

My biggest quibble with the poem is its tendency to switch from primarily modern English to near-painful archaisms like "till the sun grow too faint to nourish life" and "Then stirred in us the power of invention." However, the poet "betwixts" texts knowingly, and at times inversions are used to near-perfect results, as in:

And there where mystery and logos meet
there looms, as if it were the shape that lived
within the heartwood of the human tree,
the Poet ...

And there are many such sublime moments. Let me say in closing that if you read The Consciousness of Earth anywhere near as deeply and as ably as Esther Cameron wrote it, you’ll be hooked into:

one grand white whale
of a poetic tale!