[REVIEW] Still the Animals Enter by Jane Hilberry

Red Hen Press, 2016.

REVIEW BY REBECCA FOSTER

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Still the Animals Enter, forthcoming from Red Hen Press on April 11th, is the second full-length book of poetry from Jane Hilberry (Body Painting, 2005), a Colorado College creative writing instructor and the daughter of poet Conrad Hilberry. It is a rich, strange, and gently erotic collection featuring diverse styles and blurring the lines between child and adult, human and animal, life and death.

Many of the poems seem to have an autobiographical origin, reflecting on a religious upbringing, sisterhood, and a mother’s death. Ambivalence about the moments of transition between childhood and adulthood infuses Part One. In “Weightless,” pre-adolescence is nostalgically equated with freedom: “as if the whole world were a trampoline, each step as much up as down, as if we might escape gravity […] There were no parents, no such thing as after-dark, twilight lasted, evenings were always.” Into this idyllic scene, the onset of maturity, here represented by puberty (“the short hairs in the tub where grownups had showered”), is characterized as a threat. Likewise, in “Reading the Bible at Nine” the Eucharist is not a welcome rite of passage but a potentially menacing encounter: “The wine bit my tongue // and the wafer stuck.”

In “To Write My Autobiography,” Hilberry remembers her sisters through their quirky exclamations and jokes, but also hints at the death of a third, to whose memory the book is, in part, dedicated. She also imagines her mother (another dedicatee) being overwhelmed by her multiple daughters: “The diapers have grown large / as sheets. The baby itself is huge as a house” (from “1956”). In “The End Result,” the poet remembers how her mother, then on her deathbed, gracefully overlooked the difficulties in their relationship: “She said, I have the best daughters // anyone could have. I saw my opening: / I haven’t always been a good one. / After the smallest pause, she said, / I’m pleased with the end result.”

All events have ripple effects, Hilberry acknowledges. In “Possibly, this time,” she gives the object lesson of a friend’s suicide: like a tick passed from animal to animal or a radio broadcast that makes its way across an entire city, news of the death filters through, reminding people of the others they have lost in comparable ways:

 

each point on the map a pin fixed to a red thread

that stretches to her house, her couch—

our threads crossing threads stretched

to other pins (cocktail of drugs,

blood filling the bath)—

 

we’re all bound now

 

The collection is primarily built around pairs of opposites: literal vs. metaphorical, child vs. adult, human vs. animal, life vs. death. Through the language of metamorphosis, however, the lines start to blur. As the title phrase suggests, often this shifting of boundaries is symbolized by the appearance of animals. In “Wormhole,” a mouse hole in the baseboard lets in not just mice, but lions, tigers, and bears. A literal hole in the fence in “Possibly, this time” allows deer to come in but also anticipates the metaphorical “hole they [suicides] opened up … to make their way to another world.” Deer recur in three poems, in fact. In “the sky watched,” while a storm approaches the narrator watches a group of deer spook—“one stag statue-like, still except / for a twitch on the long torso / and a head swiveling to face the plate glass.” This is a figure on the borderline between work of art and warm-blooded, living creature.

The warmth of passion is most keenly felt in the pair of subtly erotic poems that opens Part Three. “Mere Kissing,” patterned after Roethke, belies its innocent title with suggestive vocabulary: “He rose when touched, a denser appetite” and “We shook dry blossoms, loosening their seed.” The following poem, “For Us,” makes the sexual context explicit, yet puts an intriguing slant on it by surrounding a reference to the male organ with traditionally feminine imagery: “You were natural, opening / like a flower, your penis, freesia, / the light scent.” Together these counterbalance the more negative imagery of “Weightless,” where terms like “marshes,” “cattails,” and “murky bottom” make sex seem a dark, fetid mystery.

These poems rely chiefly on alliteration rather than rhyming. “The Bottle Clock” is one key example of how Hilberry creates entrancing rhythms through repeated consonant sounds: “The bottles, glass, bounce / in boiling water, nipples / dry on a dishcloth.” Similarly, “Tailwind” uses assonance, internal rhyming, and a pile-up of one-syllable words to craft a picture of childlike determination: “At the pool he finds fins his size / in a big blue bin”. Hilberry sets her free verse in a variety of structures. Some of the poems are in paragraph form and composed of complete sentences (“Weightless” and “At the Party”); others are multi-part story poems, like “Geometry, Complicated.”

The collection draws toward a close with two excellent poems: “I will die,” a soothing description of the good death—“in bed, reading, bundled in down, / the smooth stone of my lover’s body / beside me”—and “Squirrel with an Apple,” a still life that broadens out into a lesson about accepting oneself and unequivocally loving the life one has. “And no, this is not moving toward a but, / a lyric emptiness.” Instead Hilberry ends the book with a vision of unity, absorption into the greater flow of life and time:

 

The current moves, taking, embracing.

For once, I’m unafraid.

 

[…] I swell

toward spirit, then fall to what I am, less

than a minnow in the river’s tail.

 

Earlier on, “A Hole in the Fence” finishes on a whispered offer: “You could be part of this.” The message in this resonant collection, though, is that we already are a part of it: part of a shared life that moves beyond the individual family or even the human species. We are all connected—to the children we once were, to lovers and family members lost and found, and to the animals we watch in wonder.

 

 

Rebecca Foster, an American transplant to England, has a master’s degree in Victorian literature from the University of Leeds. She is a full-time freelance writer and editor, and blogs at Bookish Beck.