Clare Goulet’s first poetry collection, centered on the North American lichen, begins with two epigraphs: the first from botanist and lichenologist Trevor Goward, from his personal collection of scientific essays titled Twelve Readings on the Lichen Thallus, and the second from philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky from her unorthodox philosophical text, Wisdom & Metaphor.

Goulet cites Goward to emphasize his metaphor which characterizes lichen—i.e., fungi that have formed a symbiotic relationship with certain species of algae or a colony of cyanobacteria—as existing at a “doorway.” Fittingly, Goward’s image points to lichen as simultaneously and inherently interconnected and varied in nature. Next, Goulet’s Zwicky epigraph complements Goward by speaking to the broader ways that Graphis scripta writes lichen successfully and poetically gestures to the manifold nature of life as a whole. In other words, Zwicky’s text, like Goulet’s beautiful collection of poetry, directs the reader to reflect on the complex, multifaceted nature of “wholeness”—particularly the notion that lichen and humans alike are in relationship with a multiplicity of other things.

In an essay for the Canadian Writing Centre Association, Goulet further underscores this “relational” dynamic; as she writes, “metaphor and lichen are about two or more wholes sharing the same space.” Goulet sees metaphors in a similar light, suggesting that a metaphor, like lichen, depends upon “conjunction.” In either scenario, Goulet claims that symbiotic bonds—whether natural or linguistic—form to create “a new entity” or “something that was not there before.”

In Graphis scripta / writing lichen, Goulet employs lichen as poetic devices to—with reference to Goward—open a doorway into the complex and poetic natural world which, similar to metaphor, always exists in generative relationship to other things. The title poem is the most emblematic of this sentiment, opening with the following three lines: “and and and and / and and hydrogen and carboncarboncarbon and / and oxygen carbon and hydrogenhydrogenhydrogen sun.” Taken together, the lines present a unique way for the reader to reflect on the ways that rhetorical “conjunction” can be used to evoke and reflect the concurrent moments always unfolding all around us. As Goulet notes in the same poem, life is “cultivated” and eventually “cross-hatched” through “collaborated” occurrences—whether it be photosynthetic processes or the act of writing itself.

The sentiment that nature and writing might be imagined in such symbiotic terms is encapsulated in the scientific etymology of “Graphis scripta” which is commonly referred to as “script lichen” or “secret writing lichen.” The name was assigned because, according to field guide Mosses, Lichens and Ferns of Northwest North America, Graphis scripta forms patterns “that resemble hieroglyphic symbols.”

Graphis scripta / writing lichen, then, is Goulet’s wonderful attempt at decoding these symbols through poetry. Yet, more importantly, it is also her attempt at reimagining them in all their innate heterogeneity and complexity—in all their wholeness.