AFTERPASTURES by CLAIRE HERO
reviewed by CHELSEA DAPPEN

 

 

 

CakeTrain, 2008.

 

Claire Hero’s chapbook, afterpastures, immerses us in a post-pastoral world where the shepherds are not only guarding their sheep, but are also dressed up in sheep’s clothing, seducing their flock. In Hero’s world, the distinction between shepherd and sheep has blurred. The innocence of pastoral life and courtship has been replaced by the pen—both the pen we sheep are kept in and the pen that makes text out of body, that responds to the lack of freedom and innocence in actual life by sublimating this absence into a wild linguistic romp through the lush foliage the pen provides.  One of the epigraphs to the collection, a quote by 19th century British critic Whitwell Elwin, a witness to Britain’s transition from land of tilled pastures to a nation of smokestacks, states, “More than half the world are human beings in sheep’s clothing.” The world in Hero’s chapbook is one where people hide beneath the costume of an animal associated with innocence, vulnerability, and Christian piety. In the post-pastoral condition, this innocence, vulnerability, and piety has become a woolen costume to don in order to find a lover and get through a life. The lines of John Berryman’s first “Dream Song” come to mind: “All the world like a woolen lover/once did seem on Henry’s side./Then came a departure./Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.” Occasionally the wool slips and casts light on the cowering human inside. It is much darker
under there.
The first poem in afterpastures, “Molt” introduces the reader to Hero’s Berrymanesque sensibility: “Something getting out of hand…Something is eating at her. Located in the velvet. Dressed out like an animal, she thistles & fickles. She fawns in a murmur of milk. Grows feral. Febrile. Soft as the inside of teeth.” The animals are getting out of their pens. The animal protagonist is gendered, a woman in costume. The costumed woman is nursed by the milk she will later produce for her young to consume. She grows into maturity, into the softness of teeth. Hero is all about the bite, the inescapable animalistic nature of our being.
In Hero’s poems, everyone finds themselves in a sheep-eat-sheep cycle of consumption, a dystopia where the only agency you have is to go hide yourself in wool or fur. Hero’s poem “Penned Inside” gives this animal-woman a voice from within the captivity of her costumed body:

“Penned inside the wondervault
I did not know my place
until I had been blooded
by the Great Chain”

Where do we go after the pasture? Where do we find sustenance after the natural world has ceased to exist? In her poem “In Afterpastures,” Hero murmurs,

“(Chicago
once a jungle—

now: the dark stall. now: who-will-feed-you.)”

Instead of pastures, there are cities. Whereas we find ourselves in a pen in “Penned inside,” we are now in stalls, inside a city’s corporate cubicles. We have been domesticated.
The shepherd tending to his sheep in Hero’s chapbooks is represented by a recurring character, a fellow (or fellow-in-animal-skin) by the name of Crackbone, hunting the animals in search of meat for consumption, both oral and carnal:

“Animals he takes apart
                          like toys—heart & liver,
breast & rib & chop

He knows what the meet wants
& he, his belt full of knives, bids us come.”
                                                                                  (“In Afterpastures”)

Later, the female protagonist gives in to Crackbone’s desires, saying to Crackbone in the poem “The Night Was Animal,” “I followed your footsteps, I opened the night-box./I scalped the meatbeasts, I bewildered my body/with hair & claw—/humping the sacrifice/through the chambers of night//…I am up to my ankles, hand cramping on the knife.” How far we have come from Marlowe’s shepherd promising pastoral pleasures to a country nymph and Raleigh’s nymph responding skeptically to Marlowe! Here, not only is the line between man and beast blurred, not only is the shepherd/sheep relationship sexualized, but now the costume of the sheep is a costume of submission. The shepherd has remained the sheep’s master, the dominant beast. The sheep must relent. The phallic knife is also the writing pen the hand cramps on. Writing is also an act of thanatoerotic submission: the sexual submission to Crackbone in “The Night Was Animal” leads to the speaker’s thoughts turning to death, and ultimately causes the speaker herself to become death, and, in the sheep’s clothing of death, she invites both Crackbone and the reader to enter her:

                              “Where is death?
Where does death enter our lives?

Death is a house inside the forest
Come. I am made of many doors.”

Sex leads to life. Life leads to death. Fear of death leads to sex. The animals reproduce. The wild, feral beasts settle down, dressing up in the clothing of domesticity. There’s something simultaneously sad and strangely reassuring about the whole cycle. In “From Huntress,” a later poem in the sequence, Hero’s speaker informs Crackbone of the consequence of her submission to him: “From huntress to heifer, Crackbone,/I have changed. I’ve become/what you spurn: some tame/meat, a teat.” Now the speaker-as-teat is capable of producing the milk she feasted on at the beginning of the cycle of poems, offering crackbone “this white sustenance…fruit of my dug & clover.” Both are clover and dug can be slang for the female anatomy.
In Hero’s poems, the true pastoral is the jungle, the forest, the place where passion doesn’t lead to being penned in. The domestic is at odds with the pastoral. Domesticity fallows the fields and tames the sheep. In her knockout poem, “Domesticity, Unforesting Fiend,” the poem where an offspring enters world of the afterpastures, Hero writes, “Domesticity, unforesting fiend, you make us/naught but fire. Nothing lives in us//but hunger. An empire of grass…//Drags us out by tongues into dark places…//(But under our aprons, those forests! We hide them, one by one, as eggs in the grass. I sprout//a mooncalf…/my little nutlet, my pollen polyp.” The child she sprouts she slings into a tree. The child—also gendered female—becomes the new wilderness, the new nature. But then the girl grows older, becomes a woman, a sexual being—“Soon, the woodsy rag between her legs.” And what do we do to her wilderness? We tame it and burn it: “We muzzle her in apron & wildfire./Wean her on sawdust and chaff.”