Jackson, WY: Lost Roads Press, 2018. 75 pages. $15.00.
Entering Cate Peebles’s debut collection, Thicket, is like stepping into a modern fairy tale or fable, replete with animals, primary colors, and questions about what sort of impression we each leave on the world at our end. Structurally centered around the long poem “The Woodlands,” Thicket invites readers to consider “once upon a” and “dream come true” not in the dark forests of childhood stories but in a contemporary, art-laden landscape with different hazards and decidedly adult outcomes. Peebles then takes us on an unsettling journey through her woods, leaving us on the other side with a few scratches and a sense that the world is less tangible than we might believe.
While not divided into specific sections, what comes before “The Woodlands” is a series of poems imbued with art in various forms: film, painting, another’s poem. Each suggests an entry—into a remembrance of Versailles, into an improbable to-do list, into cul-de-sacs and language, dreams and vanishing points. Each has its own threat: external, as “where the starved wolves / of Paris were stoned & eviscerated” (in Peebles’s opening poem, “Once Upon a Stone”), and internal, as an imaginary hammock “made of invisible / netting like the rest of me” (from “The Dream Come True Is Still in the Planning Stages”). Yet the poems are fiercely alive with sound and sensory detail. Peebles frequently concentrates her imagery so that thick layers form, as in “After thee Blue Oranges,”
Wasps bloom green azaleas
A shoebox coughs a litter of letters
Around my neck dawn places
An alphabet on yellow beads
. . .I’ll stomach the sun’s spun ashes
A spool, a nest of bronze keyholes
All brightness in this world I’ve drawn
An albino peacock, an atlas seeded & halved
which adds to an overarching feeling of the fantastic that permeates the entire collection. Though Peebles’s imaginative leaps from image to image sometimes strain easy comprehension (how does one tie a diadem, for instance, in a latter poem “Yet”), such invention and attention to how sound and rhythm make meaning is fascinating in this debut.
The sparse, oftentimes columnar and single-stanza form Peebles utilizes in “The Woodlands” expands the sense that Thicket exists in a realm that is not entirely of Earth as we know it. The full justification of most of the poems into tight columns echoes an expanse of trees, and the white space that precedes or surrounds the poems is varied enough in placement to give a sense of wilderness as opposed to a formal architectural planting. Animals abound: an escaped dancing bear, racoons, deer, rats, mollusks and snails, birds and bats, an eagle, a black snake. Alongside these companions, the persona also seems to be experiencing this wilderness with a lover, and at times the two seem to be among the wildest of the woodlands’ creations, with her:
wanting to unzip everything
around you so it falls away
succulent from the bone
so all that’s left is a golden
fuckingsun pumpingfireballs
like a swollen lung: the
building drops from the sky
your shirt & pants & earthly
body dissolve & I crawl
inside like the haggard spirit. . . .
In these poems, Peebles is intent on capturing moments that would otherwise be lost. Art, in “The Woodlands,” gives tangible objects and intangible memories and feelings an afterlife, yet the act of creation itself has an animal nature. Assuming the you in “The Woodlands” maintains a consistent identity, the lover is a painter who will crawl about the floor with a brush to:
make something appear where
it never had business existing
because you saw something on
the side of the road & thought
it needed an afterlife from
your hands & head & that’s a
simple thought to have about
creation. . . .
This, of course, makes artist and creation essential to and a part of the immortality that “The Woodlands” persona seeks to understand. Throughout Thicket, Peebles’s speaker seeks a differentiation between having color and being clear, like cellophane, as if this differentiation marks some line between life and what comes after.
Peebles’s first poem to break her established form in “The Woodlands” provides another method of reaching toward immortality. “Catalog of Pennsylvania Wildlife” is just that—a comprehensive list of animals (no insects here) alive in Pennsylvania at the time the poem was written. The poem’s simplicity—it offers no comment beyond the common animal names—suggests that some of the danger in her collection may be human-made and ecological. Following poems echo these sentiments. Ancient ideas—a flood, Medusa, martyrs, a curse—are counterpoint to contemporary images of balloons and flip-flops, “baby robins on / hot asphalt” and smoking “a cigarette after a 5 mile run.” Here in “The Woodlands,” the archetypal snake is cut apart by a septic truck driving up a hill:
. . . & the blood
does spit where the body splits
viscous oil beads in leftover flood
water an iridescent bulls-eye & I will
not tell you how to match the color
with pain there is no match to make
but one to create. . . .
Here, too, in the final page of “The Woodlands” is the intimacy of the persona stroking her lover’s hair in goodbye, his curls aglow as if they were a new portrait of Madonna col bambino. The experience doesn’t leave an “impression whatsoever— / but absence is just where / something was a second / ago” and humanity has a deep need, as Peebles has hinted throughout the entirety of this long poem, to make sense of and build its home.
Throughout Thicket, Peebles has been reaching for a better understanding of existence—no small task for a first book of poems. Is there a world and what is this world? What, beyond art, gives a lasting life? The final set of poems in Thicket, unsurprisingly, do not provide a firm answer, though spiritual references abound: purgatory, ancient altars, phantoms, a jackal, a myrtle crown, haloes, a Sun King. In her final poem “Gift Shop,” Peebles reverts again to listing. In this instance, common trifles like those found at a roadside attraction (geodes, string shells) help her imagine her life’s end. She wants “to make sure / This really happened / & isn’t some other thing / Give me proof,” which leads her to remembrances of family, lovers, friends—a surprising and lovely conclusion to the collection. Cate Peebles certainly is not alone in her questioning, nor is she alone in finding the world a confusing, dangerous, beautifully alive place. That she finds deep personal connection as a guide through her woodlands is an affirmation that life may be messy, but regardless of what we encounter in the world around us, we don’t have to face the mess alone.
