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Animal Eye
Voted one of the five best poetry collections for 2012 by Publishers Weekly, Animal Eye employs pastoral motifs to engage a discourse on life and love, as Coal Hill Review states "It is as if a scientist is at work in the basement of the museum of natural history, building a diorama of an entire ecosystem via words. She seem snot only interested in using the natural world as a metaphoric lens in her poems but is set on building them item by item into natural worlds themselves."
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
8 people are currently reading
243 people want to read
About the author
Paisley Rekdal
25 books96 followersRekdal grew up in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norwegian father. She earned a BA from the University of Washington, an MA from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of the poetry collections A Crash of Rhinos (2000), Six Girls Without Pants (2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007) as well as the book of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000).
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irresistible.” Rekdal’s work grapples with issues of race, sexuality, myth, and identity while often referencing contemporary culture.
Rekdal has been honored with a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to South Korea. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (2006) and the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Rekdal teaches at the University of Utah.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
January 1, 2016
It would be easier, always, to imagine
how unlike we are than see
how we have put our own needs in the other's
mouth.
-Paisley Rekdal, from "Closer"
I haven't read a poetry book so invitingly readable, so compellingly lyrical as this since Praise by Robert Hass, a poet whose style Rekdal's style resembles in many ways. In its high emotional pitch, in its balance between lushness and lucidity, and in its structure, which seamlessly flows between wistfully remembered past and present, the opening poem, "Why Some Girls Love Horses," invites comparison to Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas," as well as another longtime favorite poem of mine, Jorie Graham's "Salmon" -- and I'm a reader who's normally immune to the charm of poems about equestrianism, a subject I've historically tended to associate with a certain remote segment of white upper-class America.
The poems in Animal Eye, as the title suggests, mostly concern the natural world, particularly animals, and the way we as humans relate to them, or don't. Because I recently finished reading the January 2016 issue of Poetry magazine, which takes "Ecojustice Poetry" as its theme, one of the questions in my mind as I began reading Rekdal's book was whether her poems can justly be classified as "ecopoetry," and indeed a good many of them can, taking place as they do at the simultaneously menaced and menacing interface between the human world and the natural one: in zoos and stables and aquaria and natural history museums, in orchards and gardens and florist shops, at the rims of forests and at kitchen windows overlooking the sea. True, many of these settings are far from wild, but are, instead, cultivated places designed to maximize human comfort, and therefore the dialogues between humans and animals that transpire in these locations are asymmetrically slanted to favor the validation and preservation of the humans' preexisting modes of looking at the world. Still, there is a magic at work in these poems, which leaves us simultaneously more sure of and more doubtful of who we are, more certain that we are human and yet at the same time more certain that we are close to being something else that we will never completely be, as in these lines from "A Small, Soul-Colored Thing," a poem about watching a domesticated dog attack a deer:
...I wanted to loose my gray hair out
upon my shoulders, to feel antlers grow
from bone, letting my own heart be pierced
until the soft pulse shivered in the skin. No.
The dog tore at the deer's throat. And I watched it.
I was the human that could watch it. I was the small,
soul-colored thing that wouldn't change.
Though nature poems make up the bulk of this book, there are also a handful of poems here that are squarely about human matters: divorce, adultery, tango dancing, cancer, interracial love in the Rodney King era. "Easter in Lisbon," a long poem in loosely rhymed Dantean tercets about the intimacy that grows between two exchange students in Europe, one African-American and one half-Chinese-American/half-Norwegian-American, is worth the price of admission by itself, with its introspective wisdom about racism as well as its gorgeous symbolism-rich final image of a tiger that
slips back into its fog--
black and gold, and black and white--
leaving the couple to watch night fall:
to sit before their mirrorlike window,
frozen, speechless, and awed.
This collection amply demonstrates Rekdal's mastery of unmetered verse: each poem takes a visibly different shape than the one before, yet no poem in the collection is anything less than absolutely confident in its use of line breaks to refract meaning and to recharge narrative momentum, such that, as readers, our eyes are compelled to plunge headlong down every page, to follow the skilled poet wherever her hand in its worn equestrian glove beckons us to go.
how unlike we are than see
how we have put our own needs in the other's
mouth.
-Paisley Rekdal, from "Closer"
I haven't read a poetry book so invitingly readable, so compellingly lyrical as this since Praise by Robert Hass, a poet whose style Rekdal's style resembles in many ways. In its high emotional pitch, in its balance between lushness and lucidity, and in its structure, which seamlessly flows between wistfully remembered past and present, the opening poem, "Why Some Girls Love Horses," invites comparison to Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas," as well as another longtime favorite poem of mine, Jorie Graham's "Salmon" -- and I'm a reader who's normally immune to the charm of poems about equestrianism, a subject I've historically tended to associate with a certain remote segment of white upper-class America.
The poems in Animal Eye, as the title suggests, mostly concern the natural world, particularly animals, and the way we as humans relate to them, or don't. Because I recently finished reading the January 2016 issue of Poetry magazine, which takes "Ecojustice Poetry" as its theme, one of the questions in my mind as I began reading Rekdal's book was whether her poems can justly be classified as "ecopoetry," and indeed a good many of them can, taking place as they do at the simultaneously menaced and menacing interface between the human world and the natural one: in zoos and stables and aquaria and natural history museums, in orchards and gardens and florist shops, at the rims of forests and at kitchen windows overlooking the sea. True, many of these settings are far from wild, but are, instead, cultivated places designed to maximize human comfort, and therefore the dialogues between humans and animals that transpire in these locations are asymmetrically slanted to favor the validation and preservation of the humans' preexisting modes of looking at the world. Still, there is a magic at work in these poems, which leaves us simultaneously more sure of and more doubtful of who we are, more certain that we are human and yet at the same time more certain that we are close to being something else that we will never completely be, as in these lines from "A Small, Soul-Colored Thing," a poem about watching a domesticated dog attack a deer:
...I wanted to loose my gray hair out
upon my shoulders, to feel antlers grow
from bone, letting my own heart be pierced
until the soft pulse shivered in the skin. No.
The dog tore at the deer's throat. And I watched it.
I was the human that could watch it. I was the small,
soul-colored thing that wouldn't change.
Though nature poems make up the bulk of this book, there are also a handful of poems here that are squarely about human matters: divorce, adultery, tango dancing, cancer, interracial love in the Rodney King era. "Easter in Lisbon," a long poem in loosely rhymed Dantean tercets about the intimacy that grows between two exchange students in Europe, one African-American and one half-Chinese-American/half-Norwegian-American, is worth the price of admission by itself, with its introspective wisdom about racism as well as its gorgeous symbolism-rich final image of a tiger that
slips back into its fog--
black and gold, and black and white--
leaving the couple to watch night fall:
to sit before their mirrorlike window,
frozen, speechless, and awed.
This collection amply demonstrates Rekdal's mastery of unmetered verse: each poem takes a visibly different shape than the one before, yet no poem in the collection is anything less than absolutely confident in its use of line breaks to refract meaning and to recharge narrative momentum, such that, as readers, our eyes are compelled to plunge headlong down every page, to follow the skilled poet wherever her hand in its worn equestrian glove beckons us to go.
September 20, 2017
Paisley Rekdal’s Animal Eye is a collection of poems that stimulates the mind and spirit: "What we know is that frivolities we depend on most can't embed themselves; remain. But what we fear is another kind of change: that difference simmers in the very flesh, experience curdled into the thought that tears us, slowly into self- aware parts.”
Rekdal not only captures but tackles what it means to be alive. She achieves this by writing about how we interact with other people, animals, and the landscape. She captures the person as an individual as well as the part of a whole. She gives snapshots of the present but also gives what feels like a history that led to that present. Throughout the collection there is an underlying theme of environmentalism, but it is much more than that.
It’s not just the content that makes her work worth reading, but also her craft. Reading her collection was like hopping from one dream to another which I attribute to her variation of form, use of abstract imagery, and multiple points of view. This is a collection that will leave you with a crisp perspective of life’s meaning and a thirst to expand on it.
By Claudia Estrada
Rekdal not only captures but tackles what it means to be alive. She achieves this by writing about how we interact with other people, animals, and the landscape. She captures the person as an individual as well as the part of a whole. She gives snapshots of the present but also gives what feels like a history that led to that present. Throughout the collection there is an underlying theme of environmentalism, but it is much more than that.
It’s not just the content that makes her work worth reading, but also her craft. Reading her collection was like hopping from one dream to another which I attribute to her variation of form, use of abstract imagery, and multiple points of view. This is a collection that will leave you with a crisp perspective of life’s meaning and a thirst to expand on it.
By Claudia Estrada
January 16, 2013
I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine // and inflict on me (4)
the image / of the one who taught me disobedience / is the first right of being alive. (4)
oil rigs dip their certain needles / and the Inuit women's breast milk has been declared / hazardous waste (6)
the enormous, glassy sea chattering its blue / to the sky, the glacier clasped between them / quietly disappearing (6)
water / churns with miniature baleens in knuckles of white (6)
the man has left a flap / of caribou skin to dry. / It lies in a shrunken patch of snow, small / as a child's pink mitten / beside him; a valentine. (6)
a welter of bubbles; / more like sequined / purses than fish, champaigned explosions (7)
The field is wet and full of stars. (17)
(organs) that spangle fragmentary ropes (26)
the slipknot // of monogamy itself (60)
one of its spines dissolved to pear-white belly (71)
feet like rotted arteries (83)
the image / of the one who taught me disobedience / is the first right of being alive. (4)
oil rigs dip their certain needles / and the Inuit women's breast milk has been declared / hazardous waste (6)
the enormous, glassy sea chattering its blue / to the sky, the glacier clasped between them / quietly disappearing (6)
water / churns with miniature baleens in knuckles of white (6)
the man has left a flap / of caribou skin to dry. / It lies in a shrunken patch of snow, small / as a child's pink mitten / beside him; a valentine. (6)
a welter of bubbles; / more like sequined / purses than fish, champaigned explosions (7)
The field is wet and full of stars. (17)
(organs) that spangle fragmentary ropes (26)
the slipknot // of monogamy itself (60)
one of its spines dissolved to pear-white belly (71)
feet like rotted arteries (83)
July 24, 2013
Read as a 4.5 rating.
While I think it is as well-written as The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, I didn't personally connect with as many poems. Not a failing of the poet by any means.
Paisley continues to turn out unbelievably good poetry that travels through personal, historical, political... Her range is unbeatable and the cadence of her voice forces you to listen to everything she has to say. It's (once again) an amazing collection from an exceptional voice in modern poetry.
My absolute standout poem is "Yes." Just an amazing poem. I initially intended to type a section of it, but the whole poem is just so unimaginably good and it's worth the price of the book. Really. I had to double fold the corner of the page (yes, I'm a destroyer of books) and that is a distinction that very few pages of any book receive.
Love, love for this collection.
While I think it is as well-written as The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, I didn't personally connect with as many poems. Not a failing of the poet by any means.
Paisley continues to turn out unbelievably good poetry that travels through personal, historical, political... Her range is unbeatable and the cadence of her voice forces you to listen to everything she has to say. It's (once again) an amazing collection from an exceptional voice in modern poetry.
My absolute standout poem is "Yes." Just an amazing poem. I initially intended to type a section of it, but the whole poem is just so unimaginably good and it's worth the price of the book. Really. I had to double fold the corner of the page (yes, I'm a destroyer of books) and that is a distinction that very few pages of any book receive.
Love, love for this collection.
June 24, 2012
I don't like a lot of what poets are writing because I think it's confusing to the point of only being meaningful to the author. While this book felt vibrant and fresh, what I really liked was how it gave me the same joy of reading as I get with the Romantics. There were big ideas, beautiful descriptions, and epiphanic moments - all of which (I had thought) were out-of-bounds for poets these days. I especially liked Why some girls like horses, An Enemy, Easter in Lisbon, Happiness, and Dragonfly. Might teach this one next year in my Intro class.
February 6, 2022
Some very vivid imagery. Sometimes the lines are so full that there is no room for the reader's reflection or interpretation. But lovely work.
January 23, 2016
Easter in Lisbon was my favorite. Rekdal's command is evident here--the long poem which she does well, weaving in what seems to be her characteristic shimmering, precise language choice; the rumination of the exchange student she once nearly became intimate with; and what that meant in terms of the racial climate of the '90s. Rodney King is prominent in the backdrop, miles away but very much on their minds, as the other student is black and from LA and she is not. Plus, the entire poem is in a light end rhyme (the first and third lines of each 3-lined stanza rhyme, sometimes tightly and sometimes slant). Her voice lights up especially during passages about animals, which contain true, rich descriptions. This "animal" voice and language occurs throughout the volume, as you might expect with a title such as "Animal Eye." Horses, caribou, salmon, various birds, fox, sea creatures, monkeys, deer, dog, dragonfly, and more figure in this book. I'm going to read more of her.
October 16, 2012
Many of the texts in this collection deal with nature and animals and help to tie the collection together thematically - though there is also something going on with displays and exhibitions - a taxidermied display of a stuff fox - a wax museum juxtaposed with the medical theatre of a family coping with a cancer diagnosis. Then there is the long poem "Easter in Lisbon" which takes part mostly at the city's zoo (brilliant observation and descriptions) - it is a complex and rich poem that reflects on a lovers' quarrel that takes place during an excursion abroad and the self-consciousness of the couple (as bodies visibly marked by difference) and the internal dialogue of the woman in the relationship who reflects on the failure of their interracial relationship.
December 4, 2015
This is one of those wonderful collections of poetry that you can gladly and confidently give as a gift. Whomever received it would feel blessed and honored to be so highly esteemed as to receive one of the loveliest contemporary poetic works available. I would give this to someone just so they would appreciate how much love I have for him or her. Honestly, these poems are so good one feels compelled to share them. Time to buy more copies....
March 5, 2015
Best lines:
"I need a place / in which every kind of story makes sense to me."
"the small disappointments / of being a mother waiting, alone, / for someone else to comfort her."
"I can wait longer than sadness."
"There is no end to ego, / with its museum of disappointments."
"I don't know / what part of me can't be broken."
"I need a place / in which every kind of story makes sense to me."
"the small disappointments / of being a mother waiting, alone, / for someone else to comfort her."
"I can wait longer than sadness."
"There is no end to ego, / with its museum of disappointments."
"I don't know / what part of me can't be broken."
May 8, 2012
A few excellent pieces. There's potential for the future of this poet.
April 17, 2023
So, so beautiful, from the first poem.
January 11, 2021
"There is no end to ego,
with its museum of disappointments.
I want to take my neighbors into the garden
and show them: Here is consolation.
Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops
around the sparrows as they fight.
It lives alongside their misery.
It glows each evening with a violent light." — "Happiness"
with its museum of disappointments.
I want to take my neighbors into the garden
and show them: Here is consolation.
Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops
around the sparrows as they fight.
It lives alongside their misery.
It glows each evening with a violent light." — "Happiness"
September 8, 2017
Close to five stars; perhaps it deserves five. It definitely deserves rereading; for all that I disliked Rekdal's essays, I love her dense, intricate poetry and how it winds and then unfolds suddenly into clear sight.
March 4, 2019
Paisley Rekdal just keeps turning out wonderful books of poetry. Her ear and her eye are as fresh as ever. Here's a little thing I wrote about this book 5 years ago, but she has had several since:
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
April 27, 2020
Didn't resonate with me quite enough for a full 5 stars (which isn't the poet's fault, just a personal one!) but this is the best book of poetry I've read recently, and I've read a LOT of poetry recently. 9/10
December 31, 2021
I liked the fox poem, more or less. her writing just isn't my thing.
January 15, 2024
This is a great collection of poems, but compared to Nightingale, it isn't as cohesive in its themes and metaphor.
July 9, 2025
rekdal is just one of many poets i turn to when looking for guidance in craft
January 10, 2013
How deep the eye. How deep the knife, the hand, the imagination —
(from "Wax")
Paisley Rekdal's poems are at once highly visceral and hallucinatory, imagined transformations turned thought experiments gone awry, because suddenly they're real, and she's in the body of a former lover dreading her own dream scenario, the dragonfly hooks into an iris for a time, and the deer is a dog is a deer. Yes, lots of animals, many of them (perhaps all, somehow?) human. I found this collection patchy, hence the three-star rating, though even the pieces that didn't compel me consistently contributed to my highlighting enthusiasm. Those poems with which I was fortunate enough to connect are extraordinary. And long — longer, really, than I can reasonably type up and share here. So I'll simply extol the virtues of "Happiness," "Yes," "Possibilities in Love," "Homage for Levis," "Feel Like a Little Trepanning Today?" and the closing "Closer," with its magpies and quails, and offer Rekdal's briefest, clearest, most exquisite vision, which I couldn't resist reading aloud to my husband last night.
Nightingale
The boy sits at the kitchen table
pointing through the window at the dark.
There is a bird that comes out at night, he says,
that makes the most beautiful music.
Steam off the edges of the field, the gray
and brown and green of it, and beyond this, the sea.
What does he hear? I imagine
it is a nightingale, but have never heard one.
The look on the boy's face as he speaks
is the sound of a nightingale. It is the song
of a man strapped to his mast, straining
and tearing at the straps that bind him.
A small breeze moves off the sea.
It whistles over the shore, the dark
seal shapes that rock in and out
of the shoals. It hums there
till one of them turns long-necked, broken
and the clothes pull off like hair
as the divers drag the changed body
out of the sea. The field is wet and full of stars.
The boy cocks his head toward the dark.
I watch him moving back and forth
inside my vision, his body pieces of eye
and silk and arm and neck cord.
In the story, the man binds himself
so that he can listen. He wants to hear
the music that will pull him down.
He wants to put his head where the heart lives,
that small, hard singing behind a ribcage.
Night cuts down through the field. In spring,
the mists will burn off, the sea return bright green.
I have never seen such a live, dead thing before.
I think it is a nightingale. I tell the boy the name,
but he only smiles at me.
And yet, how is it not a nightingale?
Alone, the soft grunt of wings
beating behind me. I can sense its gold eye,
the throat encrusted with glass.
I can hear the water slapping
the white sides of the shore.
The boy stares out the kitchen window.
It hangs like a little square of cold before him,
a pane of shadow. The night outside this shadow
is black. The sea is distant. The bird,
however I imagine it, sings.
July 18, 2013
She has a prosy style that may appeal to fiction lovers very much. In Ëaster in Lisbon," a long poem, she builds a metaphor between an incident at the zoo and thinking about her departed friend. At a very dreary zoo in Portugal, she incites a riot among baby lemurs, who escape from both the cages and their parents, who grotesquely use their babies as "vacuums" to scoop up food dropped by tourists outside the cage walls. After they stampede to get to the orange she throws down, she decides not to take the path that goes to the tiger's cage. This very understated humor is appealing, and the stories continues as she relates the cages at the zoo to the interracial relationship with her friend who has just left. In "Tango Lesson" she captures the essence of the dance as she focuses on pleasure that is focused in the ankle instead of the hips. The music must skip beats "so that imagination/for the moment,/can enter the feet."
My favorite poem in this work is titled "Happiness." She builds on a familiar theme to many poets, linking her garden to happiness, as she addresses the problems of two neighbors who seem to resent her garden. In this salute to the joys of gardening, she bids that they consider the garden lives for itself älongside misery. What is more, she tells us "If I could not have made this garden beautiful, I wouldn't understand your suffering, nor care for each the same inflamed way."
My favorite poem in this work is titled "Happiness." She builds on a familiar theme to many poets, linking her garden to happiness, as she addresses the problems of two neighbors who seem to resent her garden. In this salute to the joys of gardening, she bids that they consider the garden lives for itself älongside misery. What is more, she tells us "If I could not have made this garden beautiful, I wouldn't understand your suffering, nor care for each the same inflamed way."
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews