Immemorial

Essayist Markham (A Map of Future Ruins) delivers a probing meditation on grief, memory, and memorialization. She recounts how viewing Greenland's melting icecaps while on a transatlantic flight got her thinking about how a memorial could capture her grief over a "vanishing future" in which humanity dodges the worst of climate change. This kicks off a winding exploration of how memory and mourning intersect in various memorials, as when Markham discusses how Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., heralded the arrival of an abstract architectural style that creates meaning through visitors' interactions with the space. "Memorials are bound up in problems of power," Markham contends, suggesting that the late-19th-century Confederate monuments she saw while on a trip to Montgomery, Ala., didn't aim to preserve the past so much as assert a white supremacist future. Other memorials mourn what hasn't yet been lost, she writes, describing how a proposed redesign of D.C.'s waterfront East Potomac Park would mark the advance of climate change by planting cherry trees on a graded slope so that as sea levels rise, rows of trees progressively drown. Despite the elegiac tone and often bleak subject matter, Markham finds hope amid the darkness, encouraging readers to "let our grief become fuel" for climate activism. Plaintive and powerful, this is hard to forget. Agent: Julia Kardon, HG Literary. (Feb.)

Mourning a changing planet. In her contribution to the publisher's Undelivered Lectures series, journalist and author Markham offers an intimate meditation on the climate crisis, particularly her frustration at finding language "to describe the very real emotions and feelings" incited by a rapidly degrading world. Beset by a sense of loss--of glaciers, bird species, forests--she suffers, she admits, from pre-traumatic stress disorder: "A condition in which a researcher experiences symptoms of trauma as they learn more about the future as it pertains to climate change and watch the world around them not making necessary precautions." For Markham, this variation of PTSD leads to a "sorrowful ache" to memorialize in some way a "future gone." That need to memorialize leads her to think about memory: her own, the "selective memory" we call history, and the functions of physical memorials as "a space for communal mourning and remembrance." She considers, for example, the impact of Maya Lin's stark Vietnam Memorial to create "a physical and psychic space for feeling." How, Markham asks, is it possible "to allow a mass of land, a body of water, a species of bird, to speak?" Many artists, she discovers, are grappling with this very question: One has created "Sound Columns--ringed sculptures standing over eight feet tall shaped in [the] form of the sound wave of an extinct birdsong." Others participate in the Bureau of Linguistic Reality, aiming to invent neologisms to shape how speakers see the world and act within it. She consults the Bureau to help her find the language that continues to elude her. "I wanted for change to be made manifest in the world," she writes, "and I continued to doubt my, or anyone's, ability to manage it with words." Urgent, heartfelt, and lyrical reflections. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.