Objects Are Closer Than They Appear

that the leaves hide . . .

calls down

the frenzied wings,

the starving beaks,

the ferrous breasts.

In the book's opening poem, "Birds Appearing in a Dream," Collier envisions an array of extraordinary, colorful creatures: "you who have made bright things from shadows,/you who have crossed the distances to roost in me." Just as birds allegorically cross the distances, passing from the material to the spiritual world, their presence here echoes dream visits to the poet from the dead or dying. Collier's spectral visitors do not seem to be vengeful or haunting but instead draw attention to the places where one pauses in that passage from one state of being to another. In "Invocation to the Heart," a surgery patient holds our attention on the moment when the heart is lifted out of the body for repair -- when neither cavity nor heart can function and each of them "lay dead awhile/waiting for the other." Collier addresses this gripping, potentially horrific scene quietly with precise, evenly paced lines.

If the book's wildness, then, is conveyed through developing a set of metaphors from the natural world and clamping formal control onto poems about difficult content, it's not surprising that Collier's darkest realm surfaces in reference to classical literature. He will publish a translation of "Medea" later this year, and two poems make use of the myth. In "The Messenger," the more unsettling of these, Jason presents Medea's gifts of a crown and robe to his new bride. At first she takes great pleasure in wearing them, but soon their poison overtakes her, and they burst into flames that consume her. When her father, Creon, rushes to kiss her farewell, he is caught up in the poisonous trap and dies horribly. This wrenching telling of the classic tale appears mid-book and stands out for being longer, denser and more lurid than Collier's other poems. However, echoes of it -- images of people and flames, moths and flames, broken birds and characters unable to disentangle themselves -- can be heard throughout. Until this poem appears, Collier's engagements with the dead seem calm. But here, to brush against the dead and dying is to be consumed. One realizes that a threat has been bubbling beneath the poems' surfaces all along.

The poet's stance in Dark Wild Realm is both alert and unsettled. His writing seeks the unstable spaces between light and shadow, waking and sleep, spirit and body, and the places where the living and dead pass one another. It's a midlife book in the best possible sense -- a continued questioning, some sobering knowledge and an openness to what's next. ·

Frances Phillips teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.