K.A. Hays
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009
Review by Rebecah Pulsifer
. . . . .In Dear Apocalypse, nature is not the backdrop to a speaker’s narrative; it is the narrative, and K.A. Hays allows each hyacinth, each plot of earth, and each season to exist as it always will: in a fluid, halfway state. Here, an untouched garden is a site of action, where “soon, the rattler, tomorrow, will swallow us, / its skin first gold, then brown, then shed….” So often in Dear Apocalypse the landscape and the speaker blur or enmesh, a strange unity—as if the subject is the object—that the speaker pushes to its limit: “I want to see / as a garden would, in winter: the toad / under leaves, mapped in brown….” Here, in a world created by an “arbitrary crash,” living things must tend to or become each other as defense against an always immanent yet opaque unmaking, which may someday leave only “bugs who have no sense / of the tragic.” But though the speaker imagines “How brown it would be” to become a turtle and nestle in “the profound mud,” one fact denies that: while nature is content to bury itself and “hulk on,” the speaker must grapple with the patterns of this world, collecting and shaping them into moments rich with the about-to-be-losing, which Dear Apocalypse both mourns and rejoices in.. . . . .Dear Apocalypse relies as much on sound as image to welcome in the reader. Many poems offer delicate rhymes that are as unexpected and necessary as rays of light, as in “The Way of All the Earth” (which will be included in The Best American Poetry 2009):
. . . . . . . . . . . . . When the winter of dust
. . . . . . . . . . . . . blustered sixty-four million years back,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and the great beasts who stalked the land suffered
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and fell, their bulk heaving the hills—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . all of that was only a loud game of billiards
. . . . . . . . . . . . . to the turtles, who sank down away from the light
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and let the arms and legs float in the waters,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . each belly atop another shell, the skin assuming
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the work of the lungs, so the lungs—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . as the earth above wasted and tore—
. . . . . . . . . . . . . might, through that din, be still.
Here, the sound-scape is crafted so carefully that the trail of vowel sounds seems to open up a new language or even new images for the poet to pursue. This is a music Hays often returns to: like the wren in her poem “But Then Again It Might Be Possible,” the speaker “has a double / voice, halftones and overtones, released / in the same moment.”
. . . . .The poems in Dear Apocalypse spend many lines imagining another existence, a sort of in-between space in which the speaker can reject the temporal, the limited, and the human by envisioning a role in nature’s careful repetitions. In “That Death,” the speaker admits the distance that exists between herself and a brush wolf:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...It loped,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . a line no longer than a hyphen,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and skimmed the scrub a half mile off,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . then sat, to make a silhouette
. . . . . . . . . . . . . of dog (but not quite dog). I sensed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . what it was, but did not want to come
. . . . . . . . . . . . . to the fact (to touch the rib, to rub
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the raked fur at the crown).
The speaker hesitates in the moment before recognition, a tense deliberation that mirrors other moments in Dear Apocalypse: in “Hyacinths,” the speaker raises bulbs—“like ancient kiln-fired balls”—noting “A bulb will rot in water, / so it must sit, hanging over / what could end it.” The speaker makes dog from wolf; friend from predator, toying with the earth’s coincidences though they may become danger, apocalypse, the irrefutable ending so often hinted at throughout Hays’ book. To accomplish this wire-walking, the voice in Dear Apocalypse is often whimsical and bold. The title poem confides in the reader: “we had / a god who grumbled. . . .through us… / He was, like any other man,. . . .complicated.” In “I Don’t Believe the View from Here,” Hays writes of a whale’s baleen:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . How easy it would be
. . . . . . . . . . . . . if I had a filter like that for perception,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . so only, say, honeydew and the words of true prophets
. . . . . . . . . . . . . could rush in like nourishing plankton while my own death
. . . . . . . . . . . . . and the suffering of others couldn’t reach me
. . . . . . . . . . . . . but were stopped just at the lip—
There is the sense that these speckles of imagining, this unapologetic frankness, this delightfully peculiar voice is constructing magic from the darkness, or—in the words of Hays—“doing what conditions urge.”
. . . . .Dear Apocalypse holds the world by the hand while allowing it to evolve and die. Its richness of image is like looking in a snow globe and seeing every memory in order; its prismatic voice is like opening the door to a mind and examining each thought as it strolls past. Hays’ book will both cringe at the apocalypse and write to it a letter, sharing such immediacy, such beauty, and such boldness that it—and us, the lucky readers—might be made to remember something of this world.
Rebecah Pulsifer is the Associate Editor of OT!M.
