Reign of Snakes (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Wrigley, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140589198 ISBN 13: 9780140589191

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1999

Synopsis

Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night."

. . . a frigid day in February and a full-grownrattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil.

--from "Reign of Snakes"

About this title

About the Author

Robert Wrigley is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. His sixth and most recent book, Lives of the Animals, won the 2004 Poets’ Prize.

Reviews

Memories and loves, and a knowledge of the Midwest's plants, insects and animals, combine in Wrigley's fifth collection to create an eccentric "bland, humdrum, quotidian guilt." Nature poems like those preceding each of the volume's four parts cram the landscape with highly wrought sonic and syntactic resonances (a plant is "a dessicate dump the strumpet sparrows/ spread far and wide"). But most often, the affected syntax surrounds more directly confessional moments of the hunter's peculiar agonies, as in the title poem: "And I have hacked rattlesnakes to bloody hunks,/ grunting my rage, and made with a single surgical blow/ a guillotine of the shovel's edge." By the end of poems like "Flies," "Hoarfrost," "Art" and "Prey" it doesn't much matter whether such violence is being critiqued or fetishized, as interest has long since waned. Shifting such interrogations of physicality to people, however, like the poet's wife and children, results in a bad fusion of Whitman, D. H. Lawrence and antiquarian porn: if after childbirth "her breasts, those lovely baubles, became/ mammary glands, lactate factories, unfirmed/ unto womanliness and not a bit less lovely." The results of such simplistic representations are condescending and baffling. At best, they bring one back to the piscatory eclogues and lush, self-involved phrasings of the Rhymer's Club. But unlike them, these poems don't seem to have anything to teach us about nature.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

His first two books recently reprinted by the Univ. of Illinois Press, the Idaho-based Wrigley, in his fifth, again proves why he earned the imprimatur of the late James Dickey. Wrigleys harsh and raw verse exults in its masculinity, and in the toughness of nature: his wife, in one poem, smells the testosterone in the images of heavy equipment floating downriver after a flood. But this and other bouts of sappinessespecially in poems about his childrenshouldnt distract from Wrigleys strength in poems that re-create in their sounds natures gutturals: his compound word-hoards rely on all the non-metrical devices (assonance, consonance, alliteration, internal rhymes) to capture the brutality on display all around him in the West. Many of these poems locate him in the wilderness, as vigilist, eulogist, and even savior. Both Whitman and the Bible lurk behind his long lines, and a number of his longer narratives are printed in italics, alerting us to the heightened language: in The Afterlife, he aspires to the stillness of the heron; in Amazing Grace, his admitted yawp sounds good, but meanders like Dickey at his incoherent worst; in Meditation at Bedrock Canyon, another self-conscious nod to Whitman, he celebrates the forest medieval; and the last one, The Name, witnesses the birth of his son, exhibiting the poets sensitivity. The most memorable sequence, though, is the title section, nine narratives with snakes in them, from a portrait of a religious snakehandler to the memory of a beautiful woman next door in his youth, who snapped a copperhead dead with one whip. The creepiest section puns on the title of the volumea literal rain of snakes drops down on an earthmover that hits upon a den. Ophidiphobes beware: others will tire of Wrigleys pantheistic excess, and his expansive need to embrace even bathos. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Wrigley is acutely aware of both his enmeshment within nature and his intellectual separation from it. Death and the slow rot and fade that follow intrigue him, and many poems are cued to scenes of animals in peril due to the actions of humans. A "sad moose" slowly succumbs to old age and starvation with an arrow lodged in his flank. A beaver is struck by a car. A buck is trapped in a barbed-wire fence. A wounded mouse stands stock-still surrounded by two cats and a dog. And then there are the snakes, both worshiped and murdered by men and women with equal fervor and conviction. Wrigley ponders what it is that we have that animals lack, and what animals have that we can only long for: their perfect fit with the cosmos. His unsentimental contemplation of nature's fecundity and the mythic trials of drought, flood, fire, and ice give rise to endless questions of faith. Dramatic and heady, Wrigley's transporting poems knit us tightly into the glistening web of life. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140589198
• ISBN 13: 9780140589191
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112