Salt Moon by Noel Crook (review)

A stunning brutality runs through Texas-born Noel Crook’s Salt Moon, winner of Crab Orchard Series in Poetry’s First Book Award. The world depicted is beautiful but merciless, the line between human and wild realms blurred. In the ekphrastic “Turner’s Suns,” the painter’s hot, blinding “God’s-eye” sun falls like “a mushroom cloud of saffron / vapor under which not one thing is spared.” Nothing is spared in these poems either. In riveting, often exquisite language, the poems acknowledge cruelty, need, and desire in both animal and human domains, though animals see more clearly and house dogs may bark warnings to clueless owners. Readers should perhaps be given their own heads-up: danger ahead; proceed at your own risk—but the risk is worth the reading.

The opening poem, “Big Sky,” lets readers know what they are in for. Its narrator describes the Carolina woods where she resides as green with trees and “ten kinds of birds all hollering / at once.” This is not to her liking. “I want the western sky / of my girl-hood,” she declares, “purple as lupines / and longing”:

Give me sun-stunted scrub oaks rooted in rock and shaped like bad hearts; the summer a mountain lion

ambushed an appaloosa colt by the barn and two bottle-fed backyard deer, their bones dragged to the dump to be picked clean

and sun-whitened.

We understand that “bottle-fed” deer don’t stand a chance in the wild but may assume human beings would show more mercy. The ensuing lines argue otherwise:

    Give me flint arrowhead the color of lost rivers, the barbed-wire fact that Comanche girls

liked burning the captured fawn slowly to death before breakfast; scorched earth, nights rampant with stars,

the Pleiades fleeing, an orange skiff of moon going down fast into black swells of hills. Sunrise the colors of cataclysm, the singular

solace of the canyon wrens, their strafed ululations, and, in a cartwheel of azure, the lone buzzard wheeling and waiting.

Crook’s description of the stark, violent beauty of the natural world provides a context for human cruelty she depicts—and perhaps an explanation. Nature is inherently scorched, rampant, straffed, a cataclysm—and perhaps so are we. Looking at it all dead-on is what the poet prefers.

Stark reality can be bracing even when tragic. In “Owl,” the speaker finds the raptor’s sad leavings: “dry orbs of bone and fur laced / with tiny xylophones of vertebra, // little femurs, sharp-chinned skulls.” She nevertheless admires the owl, would like to tell him how she once “heard the cry of something small/from the woods behind the barn—a low pain-whistle that spiked my blood. . . . And he would tell how he knows death as swoop / and smack of beak, the crush of small bones, the kick of the whole mouse in the craw.”

In “Skull,” a mother watches her children sleep, seeing “one who throws the covers off, his arms / and legs flung wide like a sea star; one with a dog at her feet and three dolls / tucked in neatly, their bristled heads / on the pillow beside her; one who murmurs in his sleep for pancakes.” The language is tender, unlike that in most poems in this volume, but parents, even animal ones, want to protect their offspring. The ominous “Crows” ends with a cawed warning: “Watch, watch, watch. . . . Count the children again.”

It seems fair to ask if these poems depict valid perceptions of danger or the projections of depression. “Melancholia,” suggests that the poet/speaker has asked that question herself:

Who is this knocking at my door? I should not but will let him in

since he is sad mouthed and solemn and pretends to know me best.

Love, he says, come here to me, put out your lip so I can bite it.

The admission is brave but belied by the preponderance of poems in this volume. They argue for the actuality of danger, the excitement danger can engender (especially that associated with sexual desire), and even an...