Nature Imagery in Rookery

Traci Brimhall’s book of poems, Rookery, explores love, death, sex, history and mythology through her uniquely evocative language. The book is separated into three sections, each titled with an alternative definition for the word “rookery” (“a colony of rooks,” “a breeding place,” and “a crowded tenement house”).

Brimhall’s imagery is the most evocative aspect of her poems, and her fresh sense of language allows for such expressive images as “they sing like prisoners with hands full of moonlight” (from “Noli Me Tengere), “My father’s heart is a jar of nails” (from “Restoration of the Saints”), and “the soft ocular cells are the easiest way into the red feast of the heart” (Fiat Lux). There are very few of Brimhall’s lines that don’t read as rich as these, and it’s marvelous.

Many of Brimhall’s images and poems revolve around nature, and how interaction in the natural world reflects, informs, or emphasizes human interaction.  One of the greatest examples of this is the first poem in the collection, “Aubade with a Broken Neck,” which begins with the lines, “The first night you don’t come home/summer rains shake the clematis.” Here, Brimhall immediately puts the human world in direct relation to the natural world, and the image of small flowers being battered by rain reflects the speaker’s own personal battering she receives by the realization that her significant other is unfaithful. The rain—which is supposed to nurture the flowers—is beating them, just like the speaker’s love is beating her.

Later in the poem, the speaker describes her dog coming to her with a bird in its teeth, and says, “He gives me her pain/like a gift, and I take it” creating a ritualistic tone to this strange situation. The pain is powerful, and the speaker acknowledges it in a spiritual sense. When the speaker brings the bird inside the house in another interaction between nature and humanity, she describes,

            …I read

            the auspices—the way she flutters against

            the wallpaper’s moldy roses means

all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling

means a storm approaches. You should see

her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing

at the starless window, her body a dart,

her body the arrow of longing, aimed,

as all desperate things are, to crash

not into the object of desire,

but into the darkness behind it (5).

The spiritual diction continues with “auspices,” as the speaker takes her observations not only as observations but as omens. The juxtaposition of the struggling bird and the “wallpaper’s moldy roses” creates a tragic image of the life and the love that is withering. The speaker then equates the ceiling to the sky, the storm approaching being most likely internal. The “starless window” emphasizes the disparity between the natural and artificial world, as well as the bird’s innocence in its desperation, as we know, it will inevitably crash, as will the speaker, “not into the object of desire,/but into the darkness behind it” (5).

            Brimhall’s entire collection is laden with this spiritual dedication to the natural world. In “Appalachian Aubade,” the speaker says, “You set fire to our maps and give your faith/to the voyaging starlight.” This act of abandoning the plans of a relationship, hoping it would simply be written in the stars, was an act of faith. One, we learn, that fails them both, since the speaker says near the end,

            we must admit we’re wrong—we can’t

            find our way by the stars. And we can’t remember what

we came here searching for, but we found our names

            on separate trees (19).

The idea of these two finding their names on separate trees gives a natural metaphor for their incompatible destinies.

            As I got further into Brimhall’s collection, her use of natural imagery was astounding, and really made looking at the physical world seem like a religious experience. If nothing else, I would like to have that experience that Brimhall’s poetry evokes, to have nature “bring my soul to the surface of my body” (54).