Apprenticed to Justice (review)

The first prose-poem episode of Kimberly Blaeser's "Two Oak Stories" involves an encounter with a red-tailed hawk. Its "glorious fan open," the bird unexpectedly becomes both the observed and the observer, as it "Corkscrews head; keeps me in sight. And I turn mine, pounding heart holding, hawk in my vision. Two watchers; some wordless exchange." A strange intercourse, this, and a strange story, but it is through just such moments of uncanny epiphany that Blaeser's new collection of poems, Apprenticed to Justice, offers the reader a marvelous apprenticeship in itself.

I turn first to Blaeser's many brilliant naturist efforts in the poetry here, in which the spring is a Blakean return of delight, even for those of "us" humans who are able to "feast on each bright color / purple violets, golden crest / on the puffed breast of meadowlark, / who drink in every strut of turkey / each simmering warbler song" ("Stories of Fire"). Such passages are most copious in section 2, which might have simply been titled "Nature." Blaeser's own title, "That Which Refuses Pretension," is, in fact, pretty pretentious, but her point is that the lives and languages of other species transcend human hubris. If "So much talk today" is the subject of her poem "20 September," that discourse includes "even the tiniest triangles of bird's feet / sound[ing] autumn leaves." The "talk" continues, including the poet's acknowledgment of the limitations of human speech: "Now air holds bird song. Feathered voices so syncopated or symphonic, filled with rapid trills and climbing an impossible range. And I with only one voice box and one tongue" ("Listing Ecstatic"). This key-note poem from the section and collection proceeds to a French impressionist vision of "four goldfinches," envisioned as "Yellow and black flowers of the air planted here for this instant." But most wonderfully, the poet comes to a greater realization of her craft itself as an "ecological" endeavor, as an art "growing" out of the natural world: "Writing, I, too, curve myself into a vessel [like the plants, etc.], wear turning shades of wonder, strive to glisten—this small way." No pretension here, unless it is the very identification with the ecosphere itself, this (welcome, to my mind) erasure of borders between the human and nonhuman.

Nowhere is this merger more earnest than in her tribute to the loon, a border creature itself between water and air. The various descriptions of the bird in life and motion are well done—"Her white chest lifted from the water / wings spread and poised / on the loon edge of song dance or flight" ("Boundaries")—but it is the final section, "Invocation," in which Blaeser reaches across "boundaries," across the borders of species: "Teach me now to hold myself on the brink / now to cry in wild echoing abandon / Ahh-raw-roooooooooooo." No "small" sound, this, nor is it any longer entirely human, as the poem ends with (at least the hope for) an abandonment of human pretension—with a loon's wild yodel.

Like her Anishinaabe compatriot, Gerald Vizenor (whose work she has written on), Blaeser finds in the haiku form an apt model for her north-woods Native oral tradition. And a few of these nature paintings-in-motion, with their characteristically transformative third line, must be quoted entire: "Gelatin tadpoles / sprout legs one two three, now four. Tail / going-going—frog!"; "Northern follows jig / body flashes with strike, dive: / broken line floats up." My favorite, though, is the last of a haiku series called "Haiku Journey": "now one to seven / deer or haiku syllables / weave through winter trees." Just as the poet elsewhere becomes creative flowering plant or crying loon, here human discourse and the nonhuman world become interwoven, resulting in a fruitful "confusion," if you will.

Indeed, in contrast to some of the more straightforward tours de force of literary naturism quoted above, Blaeser's most characteristic act of imagination is ultimately one of derealization, whether a simple perceptual illusion or a wholesale erasure (or merger) of ontological identity and epistemological categories. Thus the question...