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| Poet Liz Hutchinson |
Animalalia
Liz Hutchinson
Salem, Mass.: Yes/No Press, 2017
ISBN 9780692837757, $14.95
Reviewed by David
P. Miller
Poems about animals: a keyword search
in Poetry.org on the simple word “animals” brings 326 results on
July 19, 2018, including titles such as “Four Questions Regarding
the Dreams of Animals” (Susan Stewart), “To Pipe the Animals
Aboard Noah’s Ark” (Constance Urdang) and “O My Sweet Animals”
(Salvatore Quasimodo). I immediately think of Ogden Nash’s poems
for The Carnival of The Animals, read by Noel Coward on an LP
I had in childhood. The book in hand, Liz Hutchinson’s Animalalia,
doesn’t have animal, beast, creature, etc. words in any of the
poems’ titles: the titles themselves are mute. That is, the titles
are drawings: the contents page matches thumbnails with page numbers.
There are thirteen sections, each dedicated to the creature in the
drawing. In the drawings (by Scout Hutchinson), those creatures who
have faces (not all do) have their backs to us or regard us
obliquely. None of them face us. They aren’t performing or posing,
and they certainly don’t explain themselves to us. They’re not
available to become videos on social media.
Animalalia consists mostly of
prose poems, with one numbered statement or section per page. The
book design is generous, with plenty of white space to invite
reflection or daydreaming before moving on. Most are in four to ten
sections; the longest (fox) has twelve. The briefest consists of one
unnumbered page: this is for the animal represented by a drawing of a
constellation. It would be a spoiler to say more about that one.
Three of the sections (rabbit, fox, and cat) are presented in pages
of verse paragraphs.
It is difficult to generalize about Liz
Hutchinson’s animal-writing, and that’s a sign of the work’s
strength. Each creature requires its own approach to the challenge of
minding the gap between our (often facile) sense of identification
with other humans, and our typical difficulties with “understanding
animals,” once we drop the habit of anthropomorphizing. We’re all
sentient beings, but the spaces among our sentiences are permanent
mysteries. And we just have to keep trying to find our way in: we
don’t really know how Dr. Doolittle managed it, say. We can be
sure, though, that “Hello, I’m a giraffe, have you ever seen
anything like me?” or the like is pretty much played out.
Human/other animal communication is
immediately enabled and prevented by the premise of Bear. The reader
has been waiting, apparently – “After what feels like a long
time” – and the spark almost jumps the gap – “the bear rips
the page out of her notebook, folds it twice. When you open it, you
see that her folding has marred the ink.” It’s the instant
failure of anthropomorphizing hope: the bear has a notebook with a
message just for you, available and impossible. “It might have been
[…] it might have been” a great many things: esoteric bear dance
steps, a story about her break-in to the house of Three Goldilockses,
a refutation of your intrusive action: “Do I come to your den in
the middle of the day? I don’t think so, I do not.” It might have
been a berry stain. The bear is gone, and nothing remains but an
undefined gesture between species.
Unlike Bear, Skunk lives where we do.
Skunks have a knowledge of our extended spaces, but theirs is alien
to ours: skunks map. “Skunks map your driveway.” “They have
maps for things you’ve never heard of.” “They map out whole
neighborhoods in chicken bones, draw slippery trails through lo
mein.” We more or less know that our garbage can make their
landmarks; we didn’t know that “night, the smell of snow,
despair” are mapped too, as well as “more constellations […]
more stars, all the things they point to.” Skunk’s knowledge is
hermetic to us, but unintentionally: they just make different
transparencies overlaid on the same phenomena. We might have access
to something like this if, when “stoop[ing] down to pick up one
skeletonized leaf” from the driveway, you might then “trace the
map of your life: the taste of something sweet gone sour.”
Cat is, of course, famously one anchor
of the cat/dog polarity. Is Cat actually there for you, cat lover? Is
she, as some insist, faking it for food and housing? Does she maybe
have only an orthogonal relationship with what we call affection?
“Cat is a cat / accidentally // She didn’t mean / to do it / but
there it is”. Maybe both she and you form relationships out of
continual misunderstanding:
When Cat is inside
she is a cat
She wears her
self for you
You don’t know
who Cat is
when she’s
outside
She looks at you
with big eyes
brings the sparrow
inside
You watch its head
turn back and forth
in her mouth
It could be a matter of misread signals
— “you see her / out in the neighborhood // looking at you / like
she’s never seen you // like she’s never seen anything / on such
slow stupid legs” — which have somehow stayed in a wobbly balance
for millennia.
Perhaps it is because rabbits are
inherently furtive (rarely living with us as pets, mostly seen
running away) that the rabbit poems are elusive. Full of suggestion
but bounding off into the underbrush. Plums, a jacket, rain, rabbits
(but mainly the idea of rabbits): these elements combine and
reconfigure in a multiply-folded puzzle. Who is speaking here?
mother told me
not to run
with plums in my
mouth mother
isn’t always
right
(Note in passing the stark brief line,
“mouth mother” and the affirmation of “right” free of the
denial “isn’t always.”) Or, what is a rabbit’s paw – a good
luck charm or a means of escape? “there is no way // or knowing /
which one it means / at any given time”. Perhaps they’re not
animals at all, but tokens for “your hands // which you fold / like
two rabbits / in your pockets” over-filled by plums. In most of the
sections of Animalia, the creatures are named in upper-case
(Bear, Crow, Fox), like proper names assigned to individuals. Not
here, as there’s barely any actual rabbit anywhere.
Two more instances will further suggest
the range of animal being in Animalalia. Coyote is an
antihero: his is the outside case here of solo animal readable as
solo human. This coyote is one we all thought we knew. His name is
silenced, and I won’t tell you, but we know him as an animated
figure fixated on a roadrunner. (Oh, that coyote.) What might it be
like if his cartoons were documentary, a kind of cinema verité? His
obsession blossoms into self-loathing and regret, his ACME bills are
out of hand, he becomes the object of his desire, the archetypal
Roadrunner, in his dreams. He finds roadrunner roadkill: “consumed
by lust and terror … He devours it, bursts into tears and shakes
for days afterward.” When he “falls from a great height,” as
we’ve so often seen him do in these pursuits, what does this
actually mean? “He does not collapse into a limbed accordion. He
sprains his wrist, twists his ankle and hits his head. It’s all he
can do to crawl home.” Existentially miserable, a prisoner of his
compulsion, Coyote goes to the mountain, “dances Roadrunnercoyote,
Coyoteroadrunner, round and round.” A new transformative legend
arises from the hilarity of the premise: Liz Hutchinson beautifully
works a piece of popular culture away from any expected meme.
The final example is the first: Owl,
whose section begins the book. Owl is not found to be wise-old, and
does not utter “whoo.” He begins in relationship with a dying
tree, a state which seems apparent (“The owl rides the tree
bareback. The owl and the tree are old friends.”) But the owl’s
connections also seem opaque though plainly stated. He abandons the
tree as soon as it dies and “takes the long way around the forest”
to avoid it afterwards. The longings between owl and tree are
asymmetric: the tree wants an owl hat but the owl only wears hats of
other owls. The owl might stalk newborn kittens in a dumpster behind
Burger King, but we only learn of the owl listening to their
“collective, unsorted mewl.” Does the owl deliberately conceal
its meanings from us, or are they disconnected by the owl’s very
nature? (The opposite of the coyote’s tale.) Was it always
impossible to go beneath bare observation? “Nobody knows if owls
bury their dead because owls have a different definition of both the
word bury and the word dead.” There’s a suggestion of linkage,
that we might find owls in ourselves, but it stays empirical: “If I
am an owl and you are an owl then we are probably all owls who drink
from the same ceramic bowl.” The owl grazes us, scratching If
you are an owl into the glass of a bedroom window, but there’s
no then to go with if. A suggestion abandoned as soon
as made.
I am pleased that Microsoft Word does
not recognize the word Animalalia. Liz Hutchinson’s lucidly
written but subtle parables could have been brought together under
the title “Animalia,” of which the software approves. That could
have signaled a more expected approach to the theme, instead of the
faceted surprises found here. Congratulations and thanks to Yes/No
Press for bringing this forward.
