Response to Rookery

Traci Brimhall's collection of poems, together entitle Rookery and published in 2010, is presented in a fashion of originality that I have never seen before. Brimhall's book delves into the themes of "the complication of lust and love, the bonds of mortality, and the extension outside the self into a historic view," according to Sandra Beasley's book review, all the while returning to "rookery," a word being explored by Brimhall in these poems. In this anthology the title holds an importance that is seldom upheld in other works, especially as one can interpret this collection as seeking to define "rookery."

Brimhall defines rookery in three different ways:

"1. (n) Colony of rooks Or ravens. Or crows. Related to the passerine order of birds. Family Corvidae. Kin to magpies and jays. Hatchlings fall onto bricks, and a woman buries them beneath the crocuses. She wonders why her husband doesn’t come home. Why his fingers curl into questions. Why his hips are as brief and hard as June thunder— her own body a chimney full of rain. One night she dreamed him in a basement stroking dead jackdaws and whispering someone else’s name, and when she tried to brush his singed hair and ask why, he licked salt from her eyelids and whispered, Don’t look. The cradle is burning. She awoke, and the bed was full of feathers. Black feathers. Hundreds of them.

2. (n) A breeding place Open nests of crows. Colony of seabirds. Harem of seals and their pups. Hawksbills bury their clutches and crawl back to sea. A mother and daughter walk the shore dropping starfish into a pail of vinegar. It’s unlikely they suffer, the mother says. The daughter looks at her, eyes like wood wet with rain. The mother finds a pale, capsized Medusa, says, The only immortal animal is a type of jellyfish. It matures and then grows young again. Over and over and over. It will live forever unless it’s killed. High tide brings the dead to shore— auklet, fiddler crab, a school of herring. A blowfly circles and settles on a flounder, wings twitching, she sings to her eggs as they leave her body.

3. (n) A crowded tenement house Dilapidated. Packed. Rooms and rooms teeming with the crush of people waiting for the war to be over, to pull the world back out of the dragon’s mouth. Pilgrims of blind alleys. Sojourners walking backwards into the future revising all the old myths. Blazing trails with graffiti of cinderblock saints, copyrighted love poems and prayers for apocalypse. There are dead oceans on the moon, a storm on the sun. The earth circles its star, one celestial body around another. One revolution. Two revolutions. Three. Four. And God comes down from the ceiling, bites the ears of everyone awaiting rapture, says, I can’t see you. Set yourself on fire." (Brimhall 3,27,55)

Brimhall takes the dictionary definition, perhaps hoping to portray what any person would think of upon first encountering these words. Then, with thoughts and experiences of her own, she creates poems to "fill in" these definitions, coloring the word "rookery" with the bold reds, blacks, and browns of passion, death, and self-exploration.

The first thing that struck me about Brimhall's poems was the physical structure of her pieces on the page. In her very first poem, "Prayer for Deeper Water," the piece is presented in short, structured stanzas of three lines, each line indented farther than the last, as shown below.

"Come back to bed, I say, I won’t hurt you. And you tell me
               you hate women, or at least the ones who’ve never heard
                            the frightened, wingless birds" (2)

The line breaks don't seem to have been intended to punctuate the lines, for it seems that each sentence flows much like prose. Her form is comparable to pouring a dense liquid into a mold; each stanza looks just about the same.  Because of this I would call Brimhall a "pseud-formal poet," for though her poems appear to be strictly structured, their meter is not distinctly apparent. Despite this fact, I think the form of her poems helps to embody the fact that imagery is such an evident tool used in her work.

A central element in Brimhall's poems is imagery. While telling us stories of intense emotional experience, she draws a vivid picture, often of animals, namely birds. An article on the website The Best American Poetry picks out a few words as "rich real nouns and the metaphors they work together to build: rutabaga…rough with dirt, beau soleil oysters like gnarled music boxes, silverfish, My father’s heart is a jar of nails, death’s wet dress, A mouse bruxes behind the baseboards, a stain/on snow like blood in a dancer’s shoe." I find that the imagery, eclipsing the book of poems as it does, juxtaposes the idea of nature to our human tries and tribulations. It makes me wonder if the experiences Brimhall describes are truly "natural;" not merely for the author, but for the world. 

My favorite division of the book is the first. I was pleasantly surprised by the directness of her words, but admired their cutting impressions on the reader. In "Aubade in Which the Bats Tried to Warn Me," I marvel at the raw intimacy of her words: "You put sugared hands on my neck and kissed my forehead. / No, it happened like this. When you fucked me, I could feel / how much you hated me. And you came. And I came twice." Brimhall pushes us to see past the purely physical connotations of passion.

Works Cited

Beasley, Sandra. "Review | Rookery, by Traci Brimhall, Sandra Beasley." Review | Rookery, by Traci Brimhall, Sandra Beasley. Blackbird Archive, 2011. Web. 07 Apr. 2013.

Brimhall, Traci. Rookery. Carbondale, IL, USA: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Print.

"'The Best American Poetry'" The Church of Poetry. 'The Best American Poetry' 06 June 2011. Web. 07 Apr. 2013.