The Wilderness Within

Page 12 American Book Review the Wilderness Within Anne McDuffie i’ve Heard tHe vuLtures singing: FieLd nOtes On POetry, iLLness, and nature Lucia Perillo Trinity University Press http://tupress.trinity.edu 228 pages; cloth, $24.95 “[I]t wasn’t so much the wilderness I loved,” Lucia Perillo writes, “as much as the feeling of my body moving through it, a feeling I loved best…in solitude.” As a ranger at Mt. Rainier National Park, Perillo hiked, camped, and skied the backcountry alone, but after she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) in her thirties, wilderness and solitude became increasingly inaccessible. Perillo has spent the intervening years writing and teaching—she published three award-winning books of poems and received a MacArthur fellowship in 2000—while dealing with “faster-than-normal physical decay” brought on by this incurable and progressively debilitating disease. The essays in I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature chronicle her efforts to connect with the natural world once she can no longer walk—and “to train [her]self not to overlook the common thing.” The title of this collection alludes to a line in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I’ve heard the mermaids singing, each to each.” Vultures aren’t physically able to sing—they have a more rudimentary syrinx than other birds, and the only sounds they can produce are hisses, grunts, and growls. This touch of gallows humor isn’t out of character for a writer who notes, in her website biography, that she “now decomposes in Olympia, Washington.” But the point—that Prufrock missed— is not the song, it’s the listening. “[T]he world is full of things that should be paid attention to,” Perillo writes, “even when they’re darkened by the shadow of one’s own mortality, perhaps especially when they fall inside that shadow. Life’s meaning comes from the fierceness of this attention.” Several of these essays are based on “knowledge games,” challenges that Perillo sets herself so as “to be outdoors, focused on something that lies outside [her] own body….” She writes with a naturalist’s eye and a poet’s ear, recording detailed observations in lyrical prose: “The sky has to have reached a certain color, all the egg-blue drained but the indigo not yet lit up: the bats emerge during the silver tones.” Each foray into the world offers a new path to her interior landscape, and the essays range freely between her lived experience and her extensive reading life—one informs and illuminates the other. In “Knowledge Game: Gulls,” thinking about birds leads her naturally to Emily Dickinson, “who wrote so many bird poems that birds could be called her signature subject (well, birds and also the shadowversion of their restless movement, which is the stock stillness of death).” The connections Perillo makes are always surprising, revealing both a deep knowledge of her subject and the particular cast of her mind. “The down-tug of disease” exerts its influence, but she’s always alert to the comic elements and has a sure hand with irony, so her depictions are at once pointed and darkly funny: when the doctor (whom I call Doctor Dreamboat) asked me if my pain felt like pins and needles, I said: “No, it’s more like rubbing against a hot driveway impregnated with broken glass—” and Doctor Dreamboat cut me off with one of those doctorly semi-chuckles and said, “Oh right, you’re the poet.” These essays are all carefully orchestrated around this conundrum: How to bare all without making oneself a spectacle, without turning the reader into a voyeur? Oh right. Perillo is well aware that her humor has an edge when she’s talking about taboo subjects. The essay “Job versus Prometheus” addresses the impulse to speak about pain, and takes on the unspoken ground rules for talking about disability in our culture: You might argue: Whoa, don’t try to tell me I haven’t seen people blabbering about their body-troubles…say on the kind of TV talk shows where the sufferer might win a car! But of course this...