The Peaceable Kingdom by Peter Wild (review)

178 Western American Literature That vision requires, first of all, the acceptance of the unnatural, the painful, and the mysterious: We live in a circle, taste both wreckage and sweetness, and I exchange girlhood for bird ghosts and the vibrant fasciae of the world looped inside us. (“Birdsong, Dog’s Song”) It requires the embrace, though fearful, of those thousands of things that threaten to “draw you into their orbits.” It requires love of the pickpocket, the ruined garden. One must pass equally, without passing over, the suffering of the Asian cholera victim and the neighborhood husband and wife, victims of their domestic wars. While this approach to emotional and aesthetic equa­ nimity sometimes leads to a discouraging flatness in the music of the poems (as in the beginning of “In the Shape of Joy” and elsewhere), it leads also to the triumph of the last poem, “From Here,” where pain seems no stronger than happiness. I can let my scars work themselves into clarity. Into their leaving. It would be naive to expect that this “working into clarity” is continuous, and so a second book by Marlis might well be expected to treat further the refinement of personal vision. That occurrence might point additionally to what some may feel to be this maturing generation’s curse: that it sees and feels with a sense of self too fragile to remain long without need of some kind of repair. RICHARD ROBBINS Mankato State University The Peaceable Kingdom. By Peter Wild. (Rochester, NY: Adler, 1984. 64pages, $6.95.) The poetry of Peter Wild in The Peaceable Kingdom both puzzles and delights. It puzzles when meaning obscures; it delights when meaning sud­ denly dawns. Image builds upon image; odd connections which at first do not mesh suddenly fall into place. To Wild the animal kingdom is indeed peace­ able; that is, it is capable of being at peace though it is not peaceful yet. His concern for the environment is expressed in poems such as “Pio­ neers.” He describes how once “the sky was full of them [Passenger Pig­ eons?] / so that the pioneers . . . shot them down with cannons . . . Now when you think you hear one you ask ‘if that is distant applause from another kingdom. It is.’” The poem ends on an upbeat note with the persona carving one of these birds from mesquite and carrying it to the woods where he hopes that if he releases it “at night with the right words, / [it] might come alive, flutter off. . . .” Like this poem, most of his poems show a relationship between man and other animals or between man and the land. Reviews 179 Besides the environment, Wild also uses personal experience — a visit to a friend’s place, the disappointment of an addition to the house built poorly, refurbishing an old oak chair, the wife bringing home an antique dry sink . . having wrecked your bank account. . . .” These are the kinds of dis­ appointments and joys that hit a responsive chord. But whatever the subject, Wild fills his poems with animals — his trade­ mark. A bear gets chased out of an outhouse or a moose pokes “his head out, / soapy-eyed, . . .rolling his tongue, making faces at us” or an elk kicks a beaver or a bull sticks his head out of the barn at sunset and “tests his golden throat / like Enrico Caruso getting ready for a date.” Wild’s animals are real, but they are caricatures, too, wildly tumbling together as in an ark out of a Dr. Seuss story. The serio-comic nature of Wild’s themes — the tragic overtones of a farmer and his wife who must eventually lose their farm because they are childless contrasted with the comical image of the wife “throwing / saucers and pictures out the window / in a rage because she can’t” bear a child — sometimes produces laughter full of pain. More often they produce puzzle­ ment quickly changing to delight. The poem “The Peaceable Kingdom” is at first puzzling with its two different topics. Here a young man dreams of pioneers building houses in the new world as elk graze nearby and Indians “innocent as new Christians” peek out of bushes to...