Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality.
This Mortal Coil: Poems of DNA, by Eric Forsbergh (150 pages, Resource Publications, 2023)
In This Mortal Coil, Eric Forsbergh wrestles with the essence of what it means to be human. These poems contain reflections on the human condition using DNA as the touchstone, affirming the uniqueness of each person. Although Dr. Forsbergh did not set out to write an explicitly religious book, his poems are shot through with the reflected light that Gerard Manley Hopkins describes as the “grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” In some mysterious way, God writes unique code for each human person in their DNA, with precise details delineating each person’s aptitudes, even before they come into the world and begin to unfold the chemical origami in their individual way.
Dr. Forsbergh’s interest in the ancient classics permeates his poem, “First the Good News,” in which a bloodied Odysseus crawls from the surf to be healed by an “unguent fog” sent by Athena to be presented to a “curious Penelope.” Their perfect offspring, Telemachus, will face his Trojan warriors, 7,000 rare diseases, all carried genetically: “All in battle garb/ dark eyes restless/through their helmet slits.” The stakes are very high: one of these diseases is all it will take to kill him. The new Cassandra can “predict entirely the issue of your loins…. Now no one can dismiss such a figure, robed in utter potency.” But do we truly want to know everything about our future offspring? In “Aching for an Oracle,” this new certainty may make us yearn for “the indistinct voice of a priestess/moaning from a chair.”
The idiom of science provides further images. Dr. Forsbergh spent many hours in laboratories pursuing a double major in microbiology and zoology, so when he writes about the chemical compounds that make up DNA, he is speaking a language in which he is fluent. His education in literature, theology, and art is also evident in his imagery, which germinated in the languages where these converge. He merges the idioms of science and art in “What the Eye Perceives.” Capturing early images of DNA was the feat Rosalind Franklin accomplished in 1952, sorting out unstrung proteins and ruptured nuclei.
Franklin’s lab captures Photo 51,
DNA as pure geometry:
our diagram.
A folded tight infinity.
Stranger to the world than
microscopic Cubist origami.
When the poet writes about telomeres, dots on the tip of every chromosome, we learn the astonishing fact that parts of our bodies dissolve and are replaced every ten years. He describes it as Pointillism “now thrown into reverse, you and I disappear by dots.”
The title of this book comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the prince asks pensively, “To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…?” The composition of this coil is the subject we contemplate in all its complexity and mystery.
One poem stands out with particular echoes of the transcendent. In “Twice Identified as Eve,” the poet shares the story of a federal agent who was called in to apprehend suspected heroin dealers. A woman stands “naked in a freeze of fear/ her fingers curled to small fists at her mouth /her forearms trying to hide her breasts.” Meanwhile,
[A]s only attending angels can, each burly agent
gently bends to pinch a corner of a sheet, stands
and drapes her lightly into modesty, where she begins
to breathe of Nefertiti. They avert their eyes
so cannot see the scattering of scars…
This the agents miss, occupied in the arrest.
From beneath the sheet, what’s rancid falls away from her.
And she is as washed as a Black Madonna.
Nor in her do they notice either of the two Eves.
The anthropological Eve, found deep in a cave’s recess
in the Eastern plains of Africa…. She. The gene of all our genes.
And the pristine Eve, born of the fruitful garden,
to whom God said Who told you that you were naked?
These arresting agents had been taught to preserve the dignity of the people they encountered. And in so doing, they found themselves standing on holy ground.
Eric Forsbergh’s poetry also has a muscular quality. He knows the grit of warfare in Vietnam, which buried a ticking time bomb of Agent Orange in his marrow. The poem “Smoldering” unspools his story of lurking cancer in his own body. After a war, an open wound can remain for those who are left behind, not knowing the fate of their loved ones. “The Unknown Soldiers of Shiloh Battlefield Park” are still unknown since DNA still doesn’t provide the identity of fallen soldiers. Surviving a war can still shatter soldiers when they attempt to re-enter their country if the contrast is too overwhelming. “My Veteran of Iraq” suffers this kind of crushing re-entry, crippled by PTSD. In a courageous voice from a contemporary conflict, “A Mother: Sniper for Ukraine” claims in the love of her homeland that she would rather die fighting with her husband than yield the family farm to the invading Russians.
It is impossible for me to take an impartial look at Eric Forsbergh’s poetry. I have known him and his wife as the dearest of friends for 45 years. So, I write from the loving bias of someone who knows him well enough to have heard the unedited version of the labyrinth he has lived. The love poems he writes here were taking place “In Real Life” as I first knew Eric and Yvonne. He had served in the Navy during the Vietnam War and was on the path to entering dentistry, where he would spend the next 38 years. He offered his medical skills on Latin American medical missionary trips and to America’s homeless people. He recently retired from dentistry and completed training in Scripture to bridge the gap between urban and suburban followers of Christ. He is in training to enter prisons to teach inmates how to write poetry. His poems here, which were nine years in gestation, are tethered to autobiographical allusions, but the portrait they render transcends the particularities of the human condition.
Eric Forsbergh writes in the language of love, from courtship to romance and marriage, followed by having a family. In “Gaunt but Fresh in Love,” the lover washes the hair of the beloved to build trust. In the sensual “Pursuit of Food,” the lover feeds his beloved steamed clams dribbling in butter as finger food. Marriage follows in “Summer Sunday Volleyball,” as the delight of love fuses two lives into one flesh. As the couple lives the harmony of “Violin,” the delicate interplay between them is like the simultaneous fingering of struts and bowing to give voice to music. Each poem is written with tenderness, in delicate restraint. Can passion fuel fires sufficient to warm a long marriage? In “Long Love Comes of Age,” the answer unfolds in the tempo.
What do these love poems have to do with DNA? The propagation of the human species! From expressions of their parents’ love, children enter the world with the blueprint of unique identity in their DNA. If they are fortunate enough to grow up in a family that loves and nurtures them, children can unfold their inborn potentialities most completely. These poems are a paean to love and its unfathomable generative nature, as they honor the innate dignity of each sacred soul.
Eric Forsbergh writes with insight, compassion, and humor, as he describes in well-honed vignettes the human condition, anchored in our DNA: love, identity, sex, families, babies, war, and death, as we go about our multifaceted lives, making music, solving crimes, surfing the internet, and coping with aging parents as we face our own mortality. In our DNA is written the code of the possible but also the inevitable in our lives. In each of us is an expression uniquely our own. How we live it out is our own story. What emerges in these poems is a multifaceted depiction of the complexity, the brilliance, and the unfathomable perfection of God’s creation.
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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.