Rachel Trousdale on “Collection” and “Self Portrait as Noble Pen Shell”

“Collection” and “Self Portrait as Noble Pen Shell” are pandemic poems. That fact is probably either obvious or opaque, depending on who, where, and when the reader is. There is nothing in either poem about disease. But I think they have something to say about isolation, especially when taken together. My son’s collection of interesting rocks, lovingly amassed over a series of walks up the hill behind our house during the spring and summer of 2020, persistently brought the outside (with its dirt, clinging grubs, irregular shapes, and irreducible solidity) into the hard shell of our home. These are pandemic poems in the sense that they are about the attraction and the danger of leaving apparent safety inside for the unpredictable beauties and perils out of doors.

They are also pandemic poems because during that long first year, my family—husband, five-year-old son, two-year-old daughter, and I—spent more time, and more sustained observation, in the natural world than we had ever managed before. The complex relationships between the human and the nonhuman (humans and viruses; humans and mountains; humans and the alarmingly unstable seasons; and on the smaller scale, our family and our backyard garden) shifted from background consciousness to our primary shared interest and preoccupation.

Humans’ interdependence with the natural world became a daily source of fear and joy for us, in a way that felt new to me even after decades spent reciting Shelley and Frost on long hikes. As I wrote these two poems, I wanted to catch complementary aspects of the increasing continuity I felt between my family and the landscape we live in, recognizing the hard shells we have built around our bodies and the ways those shells are, and ought to be, permeable and temporary.