Because Now There Is a Child: What Motherhood Can Teach Us About the Climate Crisis

Review of Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm

by Avryl Bender

In her 2023 collection of poems, Meltwater, Claire Wahmanholm treats language with the care of a finite resource, demonstrating a conscientious respect for the organic materials of poetry. Throughout the work, Wahmanholm repurposes lines of verse with intertextual references ranging from Sappho and Ovid to Gerard Manley Hopkins and W.H. Auden while interspersing erasure poems that adopt language from the New Yorker article “How to Mourn a Glacier” by Lacy M. Johnson. As a collection, and moreover, as a meditation on the act of collecting, Meltwater draws a striking parallel between motherhood and the environment.

A book-long abecedarian, Meltwater opens with a prose poem titled for the letter “O.” Wahmanholm outlines a creation story woven with both hope and loss. Beginning with the “Once” of conventional fairy tales, she locates the origins of life and language in not only the possibility of an “opening” but also the wound of “an operation.” Though a word like “ornateness” gives birth to “the ornate flycatcher and ornate fruit dove,” and “O” indicates “the double Os of the ovaries” that “mark the origin,” the letter “O” also epitomizes absence as it “holds the void inside itself.” In the midst of abundance and absence, Wahmanholm artfully reminds her readers of the precarity of human life.

The next lettered poem, “P,” captures a mother’s struggle to impart hope to her child while experiencing her own sense of hopelessness. Watching over her daughter, the speaker whispers, “P is for pearl, penicillin, picnic, planetarium / platypus, plink, the pocket-sized pipistrelle, the Ponderosa and its pine beetles.” With alliteration, she demonstrates the richness of nature through the plentitude of language. Yet the speaker also hides from her daughter “that P is the end of / chirp, tulip, kelp, scallop, icecap, sleep.” Meditating on the elements that compose life on earth, the speaker conceals her own grief from her child at the possibility of its ending.

Depicting creation as both idyllic and disastrous, Wahmanholm invites us to reconsider the possibility of our destruction. In “The Empty Universe,” she writes, “The stars pull away from each other // the stars pull the sky apart” as if to suggest that creation was its own act of deconstruction. Yet the following chiastic lines revise this illustration of the universe’s beginning: “or everything comes apart and the stars / expand into what that means.” Like the void of the letter “O,” absence becomes not only a site for mourning, but also for opportunity.

In “The Empty Universe,” as throughout the collection at large, the micro and the macro become interchangeable. When the speaker presses her hands to her eyes, she finds in her eyelids “black holes” that “are shredded brightly / into a web of plasma.” By calling upon plasma, a state of matter found in abundance in both human blood and outer space, Wahmanholm connects the terrestrial with the extraterrestrial – the human with the celestial.

Wahmanholm further explores such imaginative realms through her revision of fairy tales while complicating their simplistic moralism. In “Poem that Cries Wolf,” for example, by self-identifying as “I, who have done the gripping, who have been / the wolf” and “I who am the boy crying for witness,” the speaker conflates the villain and victim of Aesop's fable with her own poetic persona. Complicating our tendency to differentiate between villains and heroes, the poet leads us to consider that both motherhood and climate change may render such clear-cut categories insubstantial.

As Wahmanholm candidly renders environmental disaster and motherhood, she refuses to over-romanticize either. In “You Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You,” the speaker addresses her child with, “you are already prey, and everything out here means you harm,” before admitting that “I have done nothing to stop it” and, “have, in fact, / done all I can to make it easy for the world to wrap itself around you.” While the enjambment of this line suggests, for a moment, an embrace, the following line implies strangling – the world will “wrap itself around you / and squeeze.” Complexly entwining love with violence, Wahmanholm implies that a certain level of disillusionment is necessary for mothers to recognize and anticipate potential threats to their children.

Like many poems in the collection, “You Will Soon Enter a Land Where Everything Will Try to Kill You” is later met with a response from the poem, “In a Land Where Everything Is Already Trying to Kill Me, I Enter a New Phase of My Life in Which It Would Be Very Bad If I Died.” The opening line of this poem offers a poignant explanation for why the speaker does not wish to die: “because now there is a child.” Drawing readers in with deceptively simple, potent language, Wahmanholm demonstrates her remarkable talent for situating readers in medias res.

As a field study of language and the environment, Meltwater traces a genealogy between humans and nature, while encouraging us, as readers, to seriously consider our ongoing complicity in the climate crisis. When the poet suggests that “Half our genome / is shared with fruit,” she paints global warming as a kind of parricide. Yet the speaker, as dependent on her child as both mother and child are on the planet, discloses a complex web of interdependence that ultimately becomes the collection’s final thread of hope; the speaker concludes, “I allow myself to be yanked back up, exhausted. Seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it. By yes, by you.” In the end, the abecedarian begins its journey backwards from “z” to “y” as Wahmanholm gestures cautiously toward the optimistic hope embodied in “you” – the child, but also in us, as readers. 

Claire Wahmanholm’s Meltwater unearths the inextricable network of relationships between humans and the natural environment. In this collection, I find solace in the poet’s pragmatic honesty, but also optimism in her gentle prodding at the imagination – both comforted by and uncomfortable with the fact that “we are joined by crisis” (“Meltwater” 56).

Works Cited

Wahmanholm, Claire. Meltwater. Milkweed Editions, 2023.

Avryl Bender holds a BA in honours English literature with a minor in French language and literature from McGill University. She has done research with Poetry Matters on projects related to poetry in Montreal during the 1960s. She is a poetry editor for Scrivener Creative Review.

21 August 2025