A Swirl of Galaxies: a review of Brian Turner’s the wild delight of wild things by Miriam O’Neal

the wild delight of wild things
by Brian Turner
Alice James Books
100 pages

The world looms large—shows large, teems around us in the wild delight of wild things by Brian Turner. That could be a drawback for a collection of poems—a place so enormous, so peopled and full of relics, insects—fossils, gasses, a swirl of galaxies filled with planets and stars. In the beginning, as Turner’s long lines unroll the science of jellyfish, the non-physicality of a wave as it arrives ashore, and more, it feels like perhaps this is not what one should expect of a book that writer Lidia Yuknavitch praised, saying, “[this book] brought me to my knees, kissed the top of my head, and gently gave my heart back to me.”

And then, there it is, in “Anna Maria Island” the starting place of grief’s pilgrimage and the “you” for whom this wild long journey through the physical universe as well as the metaverse of the heart is undertaken.

“There’s so much I don’t understand. Like the stillness in our home. The urn with your ashes in the bedroom, the way the carved wooden Buddha never shifts its gaze while watching over you….”. And we are grounded in each moment even as we are carried away. So much of what happens in these poems happens to the reader like an echo or as if eavesdropping on a soliloquy to grief. The speaker addresses the ‘you’ and though we know that isn’t us, the words move inside us, touching tender walls and rough surfaces where our own griefs may have harbored—different griefs to be sure, but sorrows made somehow malleable even if they sing at a distance, sing from a darkness, sing underwater across the world in key unhearable to the human ear.

Like a series of book reports on essays out of Scientific American, we begin to learn in a haphazard way that we learn to trust, about the world we walk on, the water we swim in, the clouds we pass through as we course across this blue and green planet. But in each mode of transit Turner returns us again and again to our own water, air, fire, and light—to our own eyes and to seeing.

In “Clouds,” a long prose poem he writes, “ in each of the past 1318 days since that Tuesday morning in September when the constellation of the Swan crossed the horizon at dawn through a river of stars, I’ve been looking for you in our house…”  The line suggests we are about to meditate on the passage of time, but suddenly our attention is turned toward the clouds.

We learn that “the weight of each cloud [is] somewhere just over one million pounds” but “even with such impossible weight, with so much to carry, they float and drift on the invisible….”.

So, later, when we are returned to the intimacy of lying in bed remembering “a breeze washing sunlight over the features of your face, your hair blown back,” we are carried by that impossible weight of loss as with the float and drift of love. Grief is fused to memory as the footsteps of the Cro-Magnon family are fused to the grasslands of Tanzania where “[e]ighty-eight feet, and nothing more…. chart the narrative of a journey.” This poem, “Before and After,” begins in a flash of lightning 117,000 years ago and ends with a memory of a trek up a steep hill on the island Serifos, where “I can hear the thrill of it in your voice even now, so bright and brave, saying, Can you feel it?/ Just stretch your arms./ We’re standing in the stars.”

Unlike the more predictable poem of human-as-stardust references to the celestial, the stars and light in these poems show the way, merge, emerge, and generally behave as beacons both exterior and interior. Light “flares’”off the body, is sealed behind closed eyes, comes in the form of destructive fire and as water glow. And everywhere, eyes are at work: a house fly with its many thousand facets gathers up that many fractured bits of the image of lovers dancing in the kitchen, Ted Williams’ eyes, closed over his past in his cryogenic state in Arizona await a return to vision—a revisioning of himself. Forests burn but Hyperion, the tallest tree in the world stands watch over the sequoia grove. And we watch with the speaker—feel barely restrained grief as one by one, species go extinct. There is the return again and again to the last months before death by cancer makes the physical separation of the lovers complete.

And yet for all this loss, we journey again and again out into, not away from the world. At one point, there is the wish for total destruction (Hurricane Irma might fulfill that desire and destroy every vestige of the past along with the speaker’s own life). But the world calls out. And the speaker accepts that an answer must be voiced.

As readers and now, fellow travelers on this trek of grief, we become like the Canadian wood frogs in “Waiting for the Sun,” who have learned to die each winter to survive the Arctic cold. We witness how, as spring arrives, they “gather the cool air deep inside and, with all that they have learned from the silent place / they have traveled to in dying/ they sing.”

And how can we not sing with them?

Miriam O’Neal’s poetry, reviews, and other writing have been published in North Dakota Quarterly, Passager Journal, Galway Review, The Waxed Lemon, and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to the annual supplement “Women Who Dared” of the Tuam Herald (Co. Galway, Ireland). She translates Italian poetry. O’Neal holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC). Her collections include The Half-Said Things (Nixes Mate, 2022), The Body Dialogues (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2020), and We Start With What We’re Given (Kelsay Press, 2018). This year, she is a Finalist in the Plymouth (MA) Poet Laureate Competition and will read with other Finalists in Plymouth, on February 29, 2024 after which, the Laureateship will be decided. She is familiar with grief.