Nature as Witness, Where Humans Have Failed to See
Reviewed by Jenny Grassl
Wild Pack of the Living
by Eileen Cleary
Nixes Mate Books
February 2024, Paperback, 80 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1949279511
Wild Pack of the Living by Eileen Cleary brings us to the brink of what it means to be alive, in captivity and freedom. Through stories of a kidnapping and also of hospice, this book about loss, separation, and death explores the story of Steven Stayner, abducted in 1972 at the age of seven, taken from his real family, and forced to live with his captor for seven years. Nature—orchard, owl, oak, crow, corpse flower, and more—runs as a pack of characters in Wild Pack of the Living. In this tale of humans gone wrong, and the powerful presence of the natural world as witness, the flowers do not cloy; they arrive, watch, and listen—plants accompany, then entrap. “Dog lilies and the larkspurs may have heard.” “Day lilies escort us.” “downed pines trap me.”
Cleary creates a form for these poems, sketching the main narrative facts in the titles, bleak containers that cannot contain the bloom of poetry. This allows the unfolding of an exquisite lyrical, imagistic, and emotional encounter with Stevie and his story within the poems. He will not disappear as a person, though his name and identity are erased and replaced. “Dear Little Boy Doe” begins: “Dear Wrecked One, Dear Body of Evidence, / We are scrubbed at the table for your christening. // The salmon patch your mother called an angel kiss / blooms on the bridge of your nose. // Meanwhile, we’ll drill any clue from you, / extract a missing tooth until your name escapes. / ” This poem ends: “Would you rather we return you to your / bed of blue chiffon and snowberries, / that we kept your body / from this strange and wild pack of the living—”
The sounds of this book reverberate, delivering waves of feeling without telling about them directly. At the very start we are given: “I’d stop seeing the parkway where Red Ball Gas persists / long after it closed for business. The service clerk / sponging the windshield, dusty as a country road, /” The sibilance is like the hushed utterance of a mostly hidden snake, an ominous introduction to the story.
The book begins in the conditional Land of ‘If’— “If Stevie Were Never Taken.” The speaker of the poem hints at her relationship to Stevie’s story, saying she would “stop seeing” a gas station where Stevie was in the back seat of a car. The scene she carries. She would see Stevie, and the predator fleeing, and would get the license plate number. She would expose the sham of his church flyer business. An imagining of justice and reversing the abduction. An official missing person’s form in a poem titled “Missing,” becomes a tender portrait, allowing a cluster of meanings around name, place, and date to emerge outside the strict lines of the form.
“EYES: Brown. Shade of fawn or baby bear, a walking stick, or a baseball mitt.” Images from nature and the heavens are a subtext of their own. The sun comes blazing forth, notably in “Sun Ghazal with Burnt Out Shers:” “Red in the face the first time I faced it. The sun / hanging from before the first someone, the sun.” In “Whale Face,” “The sun’s diplomats arrive / at the grimy windows / from cloudseas, / a million coral photons / pinging the glass, / heating it alive.” One of the Hospice poems describes: “right there with the owlets watching. / The snapdragons holding graceful / against the beating sun are the last / vivid thing he remembers.” About Stevie: “See him wheel for a fly ball and catch / the sun in a field of metalmarks and finches.” Light cracks the murk of captivity and death.
The orchard is a central image of the book, “snowing almonds, / ” and a place where “bees are dancing / to direct the lost back to their hives. / ” Vivid description bears the trees to our senses “Orchards bent-double with frost. / Globes glimmer ablaze, as is their way. /” The poem “The peach Canner to His Missing Son” is a gorgeous revealing of the father’s relationship to the orchard and his son. Seasons pass, blossoms “petal this narrow prayer.” The father laments in the language of a magical garden, an origin and fullness now empty of the son. “Long past these peach trees, / the innocent hour tills. // The orchard’s arms open, as if expecting / to surround you, child.” Finally he says: “An orchard where I concede you’re missing / ” The image of canned peaches is a stark reminder of the fullness of life contained in an airless place, captivity.
The shadow story of the narrative is a human-shared loneliness and displacement, told from various perspectives, but most poignantly by way of a speaker signaling her own story of being forcibly and legally taken from her family. “Beyond the Tire Swing and Toy Boats” discloses special sympathy with Stevie’s situation. “Cruel, my heart reminds me / that once a boy was stolen /from his home and that // no one could find him; / it whispers you were taken too. / Or, is the word taken too strong? / I was removed. / Let me say this: / after this happened / the rain on a leaf / no longer belonged to either of us. / ” Although not explicit in the book, the radical takings recounted open a wider view of associations of recent separations of children and parents at the U.S. border, and the world’s war-orphaned children. The shadow of loss is of course familiar to all, reaching to darken every person’s life growing up and away from their own childhood, an abduction by time. Cleary expertly navigates this reality without sentimentality, inviting us to experience the emotions of a child, his parents, and a community in the breakage.
The book does not end with Stevie’s story. The next section is titled “Jane Doe.” There are only two poems in the section, but they stand for countless nameless women lost to violence. In the first poem, an ordinary day and night are interrupted by a predator. The stories link with Stevie’s in our minds, tales of victims and the thwarted freedom of women. “Hospice Rounds” concludes the book, a collection of stories from the village of the dead and dying. Most powerfully, “Self-Portrait of Hospice Nurse on the Road with Fallen Pole” confronts an important question of the book: “Who am I? / ” Something of an answer is offered: “ Hunted. / a hare shot by a fear it cannot outrun. / It’s a trick to fly over ice, hearing what groans and creaks beneath.” Why are we as writers and readers drawn to stories like Stevie’s, Jane Doe’s, and a hospice nurse’s? We are all hunted like a stalked seven year-old—Death, the ultimate stalker.
Death visits in the context of both deep time and the wall-clocked hour, as in the Hospice poem “Rounds.” The rounds of eternity and the nurse in the ward intersect: “A woman in a Murphy bed under a skylight. / Her eyes don’t absorb this snapshot, stars arranged two thousand years ago.” In the poem “Long Pond:” The stars telescope to a living room.” Reincarnations return the dead to the speaker. “Two men I pronounced dead visit as crows…” Led by the speaker as near-high priestess, with special wisdom about the realms of the living and the dead, the reader inhabits a liminal space with the dying. Yet, the speaker admits to the departed souls: “ I hardly know what to say.” The poems are the knowledge, a gift, beauty in the face of horror, poetry and questions to the wild pack of the living and their dead.
About the reviewer: Jenny Grassl was raised in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals, including Radar Poetry, Clarion, LIT, Ocean State Review, and Rogue Agent.