INTERPRETIVE WORK: POEMS
by ELIZABETH BRADFIELD
reviewed by JAMES ENGELHARDT

 

 

Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press. 2008.

 

The interpretive work going on in Elizabeth Bradfield’s book of poems of the same name is directed at the natural world around her. Now this is not a book of some kind of nouveau pastoralism or New Age-y grasping after Meaning in Nature that inhabits the irritating end of the nature writing spectrum. Instead, she brings her training as a scientist and her cultural standing as a lesbian to interpret a world full of marvels and mysteries. Any time Bradfield seems to reach for meaning beyond the human, she stays firmly in Spinozan pantheism. Her nature poems are interested in how and where humans and nature intersect, and her poems about gender are interested in how different aspects of culture—and human nature—interact.

Bradfield’s opening poem, as you might expect from opening poems, sets out the range of her concerns. “Creation Myth: Periosteum and Self” interleaves found language from, and I kid you not, Ron Spomer’s The Rut: The Spectacular Fall Ritual of North American Horned and Antlered Animals (his text is in italics throughout) with her own speculative delights. She begins

                        Hormonally imbalanced females of all deer species
                        have been known to grow antlers.
            This is what I choose. Periosteum rampant on my brow
            and testosterone to activate it at the pedicle.

Science and technical language, gender, desire, these are the tools and themes Bradfield will return to throughout the book. Of course, as an opening it’s not all that welcoming. It’s hard to scan a word like “periosteum,” and she doesn’t do a lot to situate a reader’s understanding of “pedicle,” either. Yet, she’s working nicely against constructions of nature as “natural,” of women read as nature, and against easy interpretations. She claims for herself that she is “more suited to other sciences, other growth” than reproduction, but as she imagines the grafted antlers, she recognizes their singlemindedness, the problems that might attend them. She notes “Essentially bucks and bulls are slaves to their antlers… / …There is no sense to it, no logic, just thrust.” The antlers have drifted to their most phallic, and the poem ends with a coy sexual innuendo that nevertheless takes up the science perfectly,

            … It does its splendid, difficult, ridiculous work and then,
            making room for its next, more varied rising,

            gorgeous and done, it falls away.

It’s the lack of sentimentality—in the lines of this poem and in the poems throughout the book—that defines the work.

The first four sections of the book trade the science and gender issues back and forth (odd sections are usually around issues of science and nature, even sections on gender and desire) and the last section pulls many of the concerns together. Which is to say that it’s a finely crafted book. Poems like “Nonnative Invasive” and “The Shepherd of Tourists on a $20 Sunset Cruise Speaks” move quickly in their small narratives and explore two of the issues plaguing the planet at the moment: species migration and what it means, and what it means to experience nature as a tourist (if it means anything at all). The poem that follows these, “Specimen,” offers a key to the book:

            How little we would see were it not
            for context, or, more specifically, things
            out of context. Flowers in a vase,
            bears in a zoo, bottled fish
            in a museum.

These lines clarify how interconnected Bradfield sees the world, and they set up an ekphrastic response to the art of Brandon Ballengée. In other poems, hikers end up at popular, roadside look-outs, whales and tourists intersect, a butch lesbian arrives in a bridesmaid dress on the back of her motorcycle. The narratives she offers are framings that compel us to reconsider our usual, default stance from which we see the world. But the lines above illustrate another aspect of her work, the language doesn’t offer a lot of delights. Compare this to the poem “Cul-de-sac Linguistics” where language is freed up and allowed a bit of play,

            …Listen, they’re learning

            how well bastard fits fucking, how ass
            can’t be mis-used. No one could hope to ease
            their jagged entries into this profane world

            which is fucking beautiful, ass-bastard gorgeous,
            the evening light wild and soaring
            like kickballs on a true arc into flowerbeds

            of penis tulips and pussy daffodils
            that nod their heads in wild agreement
            with the whorish, shit-loving lot of it.

Bradfield identifies with these players who violate social norms. The Butch Poem series has some lovely meditations on love and desire, as well as some fun, playful tweakings of straight culture, but other poems about gender explore the shock of marginalization. This mix of discomfit and celebration fits with her overall celebration of life.

The last poem, “No More Nature,” echoes Gary Snyder. In the first three quarters of the poem, the speaker and her partner have been out in nature too much, so they say “No more nature … after fourteen hours on the water in August,” after towing kayakers back to safety, after banding birds. The poem turns when she says “No more, we can’t take it, can’t // resuscitate our wonder, can’t keep up with its unrelenting. / But then we have a beer.” And in that line break is the rest of the poem. The pair head back out “to walk around the pond and look for turtles” because, in the last, they are “unwilling to miss anything.”

While the language and poetry in this collection remains firmly in the plainspoken, the importance of the poems lies in their extraordinary awareness of so many different ways to engage the world. As the crises of the twenty-first century intensify, it is this kind of careful attention to environment, humans, culture and the interconnections between the three that will describe what it means to be human.