Objects Are Closer Than They Appear
A poet's examination of his subjects is so intimate that it both reveals and distorts.

Reviewed by Frances Phillips
Sunday, April 16, 2006

DARK WILD REALM

By Michael Collier

Houghton Mifflin. 63 pp. $22

Michael Collier writes elegant, accessible, closely observed poems. It's a pleasure to encounter the words he so precisely selects. One must ask, then, where the darkness and wildness reside in Dark Wild Realm 's poems of awakening to birds singing or of kissing one's love on the lips. Surely a writer who chooses words with such care intends his title to represent the book?

The cover image gives one hint: Tony Hamblin's photograph shows bird feathers at such close range that they look like the sea at night or a set of dark stairs coated with ice. At times Collier steps so near to his subject that the thing seen is both revealed and distorted, and a threat emerges from beneath the magnified surfaces. "Mine Own John Clare," a poem about a delusional man, closes with these lines:

And sometimes -- look at me! -- he'd put his face so close to mine

I no longer saw him but the parts that he contained: pores

and blemishes, the cheek's sharp contours, and his eyes,

dark, filmy patches, watery with years of homelessness ahead

but alive, fierce, and, as I pulled away, unforgiving.

Another wild presence is the birds that land, nest, arise, devour, fall and sing throughout this book. Collier's birds are both fragile -- "less than an ounce,/and are so little of water,/more hollow than bone" -- and ominous: In "A Winter Feeding,"

something unseen

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.