Year of the Snake (review)

Refined. Intelligent. Fearless. Meticulous. Like the snake aspects of Japanese zodiac, poems in Lee Ann Roripaugh's Year of the Snake embody grace and cool beauty in both impulse and gesture. Her second collection – honored with the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry – spirals among distilled narratives from Roripaugh's childhood, mythological monologues, and narrative-meditations, yet these poems are united by the poet's eye for sensuous imagery and detail.

Roripaugh grounds her poems in a sense of place, often her childhood home in Wyoming, although we don't often see the wide vistas, wind, or mountains we may associate with that part of the country; instead, we experience the microcosms of daily life – bedroom, garden – in which we can locate ourselves. One such poem, "DDT," captures the pre-dawn and evening rituals of her parents sealing their house against the distribution of the dangerous chemical:

    The truck came
by again at dusk, and the neighborhood children
ran behind it – the sweet

spray of the pesticide
cooling the heat and dust from their bodies, settling
on the back of their tongues

like finely misted sugar
water

After finely tuned description, Roripaugh transitions to a comment on the parent-child relationship revealed in this scene – how the speaker longed to "inhale and be transformed" like "blind // fish with a third, wide eye" – the kind of change her parents are trying to avoid. This desire for transformation underpins many poems in subtle ways and often emerges from the particular tensions between mothers and daughters.

"Love Potion" is among the poems both grounded in the physical landscape and one that explores a mother-daughter bond. We are led to a garden where the speaker becomes a chemist, a child-witch mixing her mother's perfume and cold cream with sour rhubarb juice, crushed mint leaves, and spider legs with which she anoints her mother's clothing. Roripaugh skillfully mirrors the magical nature of the experience by cataloguing the intoxicating ingredients; in doing so, we become rapt. Yet underneath descriptions of flowers and herbs lies the jealousy that many of us can understand:

My mother's plants
are like favored siblings. She cuts
back their stalks, nips

their buds with quick, ruthless snips. They grow,
bloom, and don't talk
back. I become good at sabotage –

The range of imagery and contexts, as well as emotional depth, makes Year of the Snake remarkable. Animals figure into Roripaugh's imagination intimately in a way that transcends our usual, limited reactions. Whether it is the monarch butterflies that the speaker of "Nostalgia" lures with a sprig of Sweet William so that she could "see it unfurl / the black wiry length / of its sinewy tongue" or the luna moth in "Instinct" whose "prickly legs grip / my fingers, antennae / question the breath I blow / across chlorined wings", animals take on new lives (even in their deaths) because the poet can look at them with empathic curiosity. "White Butterfly," the poem that closes the collection, is perhaps the best example. Here the speaker becomes the butterfly and visits a dying loved one:

I will flutter above the cool void

of your mouth, uncurl
the sinewy, incense-like coil of my
tongue and reach deep in-

side you, as if you were a honeysuckle,
rescue your last breath
from the brittle carapace of your

body, and then fan
it with swift powerful beats of my wings
until it opens

up and breaks free – the way the cloudy heads
of dandelions
gone to seed escape the green anchors of

the stems.

Roripaugh skillfully leads us to tenderness by building up to the meditation's drama and beauty. "Loneliness" and "Transience" are just two others that bring together observations of the natural world and those poignant or harsh moments of memory. And just as she does so, Roripaugh slips in wit. She writes "Octopus in the Freezer," an apostrophe to an octopus...