Under the Vulture Tree

by David Bottoms

Poems deal with nature, winter, electricity, ghosts, traditions, music, city life, death, and the past

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Emily Kestrel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found Under the Vulture-Tree by David Bottoms recently at a used book store. I wasn't at all familiar with his work, so I dove into this one with no preconceptions. The collection consists of thirty poems grouped into five sections. For what it's worth, this is my take on it:

Many of the themes seemed reminiscent of the fiction of Updike and Cheever, hinting at the sterility and despair that lurks beneath the veneer of the modern world, despite the fact that the narrative voice is that of someone with an accomplished and comfortable life. The language itself is superficially direct and simple, as if to say: Take it or leave it. This is what it's like.

The first grouping of poems seem to be about the poet in his present life, and the impression of both privilege and dissatisfaction was strongest here. In "Heritage Farms, Settled," he describes his well-heeled neighbors "In their tennis whites, their pastel Izods, all day the women/walk down my street, their Coppertoned children/sleek as seals, trailing to the courts/and the pool." Sometimes he just can't take it and runs off into the woods, "desperate for something to praise,/something small and changing,/the delicate white maggot in its cradle/of turds..."

In "Arcana Mundi," staring across the restaurant and bar parking lot into the night sky, he gets "so entranced by the stars swelling/in the black sky, I believe they're busting/to tell me something." But his safe, suburban life precludes revelation, and "when the moon drops again behind her darkest veil/and the neighborhood goes yuppie and safe,/and the most I can divine/is that I'm alone again..."

My favorite was the third section, a group of nature poems. "Under the Vulture-Tree," describes his reaction to seeing a tree full of roosting vultures as he drifts along in his jon boat. At first, he finds them "ugly as a human heart," but as he looks closer he begins to really see them:

calling them what I'd never called them, what they are,
those dwarfed transfiguring angels,
who flock to the side of the poisoned fox, the mud turtle
crushed on the side of the road,
who pray over the leaf-graves of the anonymous lost,
with mercy enough to consume us all and give us wings.

This poem really sang to me; it's the one that made me happy I picked this up from the bookstore. It's telling that the only trace of transcendence in these works is found in the natural world, whether under a vulture-tree; or in "Awake," noticing the buds of the trees after a hard winter; or going fishing in "Gar."

Even here, the reality glimpsed behind the words is a cold and unsettling one. In "The Offering," the pleasures of a bird feeder soon turn morbid, the poet "anxious with my tiny guilt," turns to thoughts of "the willow trembling/under the feeder where the dead mouse lies in the starlight/fat as a tongue, white as a soul."

"Rats at Allatoona" returns to his desire for possibility and transformation, thwarted again by the essential rottenness and decay of reality. It's disturbing and powerful, one of the three poems that really spoke to me. If "Under the Vulture-Tree" hints at the possibility of mercy, "Rats" slaps that hope right down again. Interestingly enough, both poems arrive at their conclusions through the metaphor of being consumed.

He dreams of communing with campground rats, lying down while they crawl over him

...among cans
and ashes, shreds of their sacrament, of fingering
my hair and my face, waking
to what I am in my dream and my body, whole
and broken, having taken from the feast
and given to it, the tip of a thumb, the lobe of an ear.

The fourth section, about lessons learned in childhood, contains the strange and enigmatic poem "Wings," which tackles the topic of racism and potential violence. It describes a group of men breaking into a classroom of "the colored school" at night, after getting a phone call that "A crow on the mountain needs her wings clipped." The vandals are unnerved by the bird decorations filling the classroom, which makes them think of magic and metamorphosis, a story of a gypsy who could change herself into a hawk. When the teacher herself arrives, she is "frail, thin as a twig," asking them, "Come to chop us some wood?" Somehow along the way, the balance of power shifted to the physically fragile old teacher, and it is the men who are afraid:

What was it she taught
in her school that a man could be haunted by wings,
could see one crow on a fence,
a grackle, the shadow
of a hawk, and find his hand flying up to his eyes?

What charms did she study
that in their memory a hand hacked loose from a wrist
could flap across a desk and fly away?

On first reading, I really didn't like these poems very much, finding them rather depressing and impersonal. When I went over them again to discuss them on my blog, I found myself appreciating them more, even though I find Bottoms' vision unsettling. My favorite poets--Lisel Mueller, Mary Oliver, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost--sometimes tackle the ugly exterior of things as well, but behind it all, something mystical and beautiful shimmers through. When David Bottoms describes that exterior, with the exception of "Under the Vulture Tree" and, perhaps, "Wings," something uncomfortable and ambivalent squiggles through. There's a lot more to these selections than I saw on first glance. Overall, this is a good addition to one's poetry shelf.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 B7518u 1987