SUSAN SETTLEMYRE WILLIAMS

Review | The Orchard, by Brigit Pegeen Kelly (BOA Editions Ltd., 2004)

Where would Brigit Pegeen Kelly go? I've been pondering that question since first reading Song (BOA, 1995) several years ago. That extravagant but tightly woven, gorgeous but terrifying book seemed to represent the apogee of a particular, highly idiosyncratic poetic vision. Where could Kelly go after that? The answer, provided by her long-awaited third book, The Orchard, is "deeper."

Breadth has never seemed to interest Kelly. She found her essential material early—nearly all her images, settings, and concerns can be found (some in embryonic form) in her first book, To the Place of Trumpets, the Yale Younger Poets selection for 1987—and she has continued to work that material ever since with increasing maturity and increasing interiority. In The Orchard, as in her other two books, we find ancient walled gardens so full of crumbling statuary that they must in fact be graveyards; sick, slaughtered, or mutilated animals; and a boy-child who seems to frighten Kelly's narrator not only with his vulnerability but also with his potential to survive by destroying.

As in her previous books, this handful of major images gains incremental power through the course of The Orchard, sometimes within the course of a single poem. In "The Wolf," a relatively short poem, a diseased dog appears first as credibly real-life animal but morphs: First, only by association, she becomes the imperfect model for a sculpture of the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. Then we are told, "the sick dog comes not from the garden / But from another time, in another city, a sabbath day, foreign." She is not only ancient but also portentous. "Out of the ordered whiteness [of the foreign city] proceeds a thing of great disorder, / A shape from the world of shadows, something to drive / Away." What rough beast is this?

Later, in the title poem, a dog appears first in a dream, "big as a horse" and starving. Then, possibly, but not certainly, in waking life, the narrator encounters the dog eating a dead doe in the orchard. She lifts a rotting apple, intending to throw it at the dog to see if it will shape-shift like a dream-creature, but eventually eats the apple instead and finds that it has shifted and is "not a piece of bitter, half-eaten fruit, / But the still warm and almost beating / Heart of some holy being." In effect, the narrator herself has become the ritualistically savage dog.

The dog's last fully developed appearance, in "The Dance," confirms its allegoric character. Here, again diseased and old, the dog lurches "in and out of the black shadows / Cast by the imported cypresses," with a gait that suggests rabies. At the foot of a giant male statue, she stops and vomits up a living man, a sort of homunculus of the statue, which also comes to life itself briefly. Kelly describes the scene in language explicitly evocative of childbirth; and, in fact, it is only one of several scenes in which an animal is giving birth to an adult human through the mouth or throat. If this image is meant, as it may be, to represent the creation of poetry (speech as the means of delivery), it says something pretty disturbing about Kelly's view of her art. The dog then swallows the man again and resumes her staggering walk. "She will walk all the way / Around the world, until she comes back to the circle of stone, / And the dance is repeated." This is unquestionably a creature out of the Apocalypse.

The dead doe undergoes a similar transformation. In "Pale Rider," she appears first as an amputated corpse, her mutilation suggesting ritual sacrifice rather than everyday violence; eventually she manifests herself as a being with four heads "attached to one legless body, one golden swollen body," and "the head / Of a grown child" emerging from a fifth neck, never to be fully born, but always with "his body / Embedded in hers, his head up to the sky." The oddity of this image, the near-impossibility of picturing it, gets to one of the problems with The Orchard. Kelly's animals partake more of heraldry than of real life and, as such, move the reader to puzzlement, even disgust (that head coming out of the throat is frankly a bit gross, like a scene from Alien), but not to pity and terror.

One of the strengths of Song was that, while Kelly pushed the sensory world to its limits, she didn't often insist that her epiphanies go beyond those limits. In "Three Cows and the Moon," one of the finest poems from that earlier book, the cows never lose their character as real cows even as they take on resonances from Ezekiel. In The Orchard, we can't believe strongly enough in the reality of the dog and the mutilated doe (or any of the several other similar chimera that populate the new book) to be frightened by what they become.

Does it matter that the images are almost purely allegoric? In another poet's work—say, a poetry of postmodern verbal constructs or of in-your-face surrealism—it probably would not. But Kelly is neither a Language poet nor that particular type of surrealist. She is a visionary, one who, like a street-corner evangelist, insists on the reality of her vision and her urgent need for readers to believe and share it. Her most characteristic formal gesture is the repetition of a phrase or image with incremental corrections and refinements, as if to make it increasingly accurate:

The boy drowned in the bog. He came from
A long way off to lie down in such sickly water.
Not like water at all. Poor and brown. Not one
Fish in it, not one blind fish. . . .

This is poetry aimed at convincing the reader, not at creating intellectual puzzles. For this reason, it seems necessary that the images carry us toward conviction. Since I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief, I find it frustrating that I can't see the dog or the doe (or the lactating stone lion or the snake being carried upright by two swarms of bees) as anything more immediate than ritual objects excavated from the midden heaps of an unknown culture.

No doubt, if I weren't a fan, if I hadn't read, reread, and fallen in love with Song, I would be less impatient with the inward spiral Kelly's work follows in The Orchard. Certainly, there is much to enjoy in this new book—its hallucinatory landscape, the nearly over-the-top lushness of language like "a blossoming of sparrows" or "mayflies . . . / trembling in the air above, like the air itself made visible," its eerie menace. Kelly can combine an emotionally intense situation ("this business / Of burying oneself before one / Is dead") with a childlike simile (the "many masks [of the flesh] flayed off, / . . . like Bartholomew's / Beautiful and deadly hats") in a way that few other poets could pull off. In these and other ways, The Orchard is a splendid continuation of her oeuvre. In her future work, however, I hope that she can find a way to preserve these strengths while moving beyond the narrow plot of her orchard/garden/graveyard and its increasingly hermetic symbols. 

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