An Orchid Astronomy

An Orchid Astronomy, the ambitious debut collection by Canadian writer Tasnuva Hayden, follows a character named Sophie in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide in the far reaches of Norway’s northern permafrost. “Her eyes bruised by grief—the colour of an oil spill,” Sophie mourns the loss of her mother, and her sadness is made more intense by her arctic isolation “[a]long the measured longitude of a melting landscape.” Hayden develops themes of death and destruction with a range of scientific and historical interludes, such as these lines about various language deaths that are woven into poems describing the discovery of the mother’s frozen body:

Manx, once spoken in the Isle of Man, went extinct in 1974
     with
the death of its last speaker Ned Maddrell.
 

[...]
 

When the Turkish farmer Tevfik Esenç died in 1992, so did
Ubykh, a language from the Caucasus region that had the
     highest
number of consonants ever recorded.

Elsewhere, the speaker mentions Albert Einstein working toward a unified theory on his deathbed, and, in another poem, Hayden cites the suicide of Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. Such asides read like attempts to shift attention away from the immediate pain of a mother’s death, but they also crack the book open to the wider world and, indeed, the universe itself, “the birth and death / place of millions of stars.” While Hayden’s approach allows for moments of remarkable synchronicity, this collection, at nearly 200 pages, sometimes feels weighed down by the scope of its subject matter. Still, as a constellation of sensory impressions, the work certainly succeeds, with so many lyrics that absolutely sing, lines like: “Her wrists pearled with veins,” “The air, saturated with seaweed, shivered a little,” and “The curtains swelled into the room. / Agitated jellyfish.”