Hawk Parable: Poems

by Tyler Mills

“…Mills proves that Faulkner underestimated a poet’s ability to manage enormous shifts of scale…Haunted by the unverified possibility of her fighter-pilot grandfather’s ‘involvement in the Nagasaki mission,’ Mills scans skies for contrails, scrutinizes negatives, reads survivors’ accounts, and sifts through white sands…Mills has written a book for the long nuclear century.” – Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Hawk Parable begins with a family mystery and engages with the limits of historical knowledge―particularly of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped at the end of the Second World War and the repercussions of atomic tests the U.S. conducted throughout the 20th century. These poems explore a space between environmental crisis and a crisis of conscience.

As a lyric collection, Hawk Parable begins as a meditation on the author's grandfather's possible involvement in the Nagasaki mission and moves through poems that engage with the legacy of nuclear testing on our global environment. At times, Hawk Parable borrows language from declassified nuclear test films, survivor accounts of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, scientific studies of bird migrations through the Nevada Test Site, and the author's grandfather's letters.

This book enacts what it means to encounter fragments―of historical records, family stories, and survivor accounts―through exploring a variety of forms. Hawk Parable seeks what it means to be human in the spaces between tragedy and beauty, loss and life, in the relationships between the lyric speaker, history, and personal memory.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

Published April 22, 2019

About the author

Tyler Mills is a poet, essayist, and editor based in Chicago. Her book, Tongue Lyre, was the winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award (SIU Press 2013) and was fourth on the Believer's "Readers Favorite Works of Poetry in 2013″ list. Her poems have appeared in the Believer, Blackbird, the Boston Review, and Poetry magazine (forthcoming), and have been anthologized in A Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume, Best New Poets 2007, and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence. Her criticism has appeared in Jacket2, the Robert Frost Review, the Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere, and her poems have won magazine awards from the Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Third Coast. She has been the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, and past readings include the Bethesda Writer's Center, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pitchfork Music Festival, and the Southern Festival of Books. She is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

First Thing
Tyler Mills

You look like a monster, one woman said to another.
The woman was on fire. This is the first of two screws
twisted into a wall. One bus is sent on its route minutes before
the other. This is the first. Thousands of soldiers were lowering
their faces to the grass, as though an exercise
can will an effect. People made their way to the hospital:
a doctor would look at them, and then they could die.
You can dip a line of monofilament into a river.
You can do it twice. The first becomes a second. The second
becomes a third. Three girls stretched out their arms while the wind
sheared their flesh. Sheared, not seared, what was left.
I could have shown you a swimming pool lit with turquoise light.
It was early. It was a mission. It wasn’t the first.

Hawk Parable is a book of poetry by Tyler Mills, whose first book was the also wonderful Tongue Lyre. As of today, it is my favorite book so far this year. Among many other related issues, it is about the ever present capacity for human beings to engage in their own devastation through nuclear and atomic warfare. Mills’s own grandfather was a WWII fighter pilot and may have been involved in testing/bombing, so this was part of the impetus for the book. She doesn’t know for sure, but this very “not knowing” is one of the mysteries she investigates.

Another, related subject is how we can best represent our memories, history, experience, as each year the experience is another year older and dimmer, faded into the distance, getting somewhat obscure. But now that you know that the poem above is about Nagasaki, see if it doesn’t make a bit more sense; but not completely comprehensible, right? To even suggest something so horrific could be clearly narrated is almost an ethical issue.

What’s the relationship between memory and imagination? Of secret history and our capacity for evil? What is the best way to “capture” something beyond our ability to put something in words? Is poetry after the Holocaust or Hiroshima even possible, as Adorno asked? “We don’t have imagery,” Mills says at one point. Or why is it the imagery we use often falls short? Why, for instance, do we call it a “mushroom cloud”? Why was the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima called Little Boy? How is this an unacceptable softening of the horror? How many children alone were incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Answer: It is impossible to fix exact figures, but experts insist that a quarter million is a conservative number).

“Two sheets of archival paper, one for truth, the other, lie.”

Shakespeare liked the sonnet for the subject of love. What is the best form for war, for nuclear murder, for unspeakable suffering? Let me count some of the ways Mills uses to try to get at some of these horrific mysteries: lyric, narrative, found, “experimental,” (which tend to be more fragmented, pastiche; I think of Paul Celan’s fragmented poetry after the Holocaust, compared to his more conventional work before the war(. Mills' sources included faded photographs, her grandfather’s writing, her dreams, declassified government files, John Hershey’s Hiroshima, the testimonies of survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Some repeated images/themes: Flight (birds, planes); (nature, technology); the fragility of the body; shadows/the sun as illumination/blinding; our individual/collective responsibility for mass murder.

Mills lives and teaches now in New Mexico, near enough to Los Alamos, where so much testing took place. She’s researched the extensive testing there, and also on Bikini Atoll, and other isolated, "hidden" or not quite secret places where nuclear testing has taken place. History fades into the shadows; how do we remember what we don’t fully comprehend? Underground testing; nuclear waste buried in the ground, out of sight, out of mind. Some of these poems are “clear” and personal and some of it is dream-infused, dream-like, disoriented. Some of it is searingly direct, and some of it is difficult, complex. Trying to find the words where there are no words. Brave, terrifying. But make no mistake about it: This is gorgeous, humane, important work, absolutely astonishing work.

One small and "simple" “found” poem taken from actual survivor testimony:

The Baby

I was hanging the baby’s diapers on the balcony
When I noticed
A multicolored parachute
Floating in the sky.

Another survivor writes: “It is impossible for me to write anymore. Forgive me.”

Four more of the poems from this collection can be found here:

http://pinwheeljournal.com/poets/tyle...

Here is some of her related visual/aural work Punch Cards:

http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/from-a...

Here is an essay that can be found at the Poetry Foundation site about her research into nuclear testing/detonation/devastation that explains the Punch Cards work:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr...

[Emerson Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

So beautifully devastating

[Ellora Lawhorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a beautiful and heart-wrenching tribute to the horrors and humanity of the dawn of atomic science. Mills takes both blinding glimpses of scientific testing and tender laments of victims of Nagasaki, then uses the speckled past of her 1940s pilot grandfather to weave these pieces seamlessly together.

The grandfather as a character and speaker in this book was super poignant, especially since neither we nor the author know all of his story. It is a spectacular take on biographic poetry – to tell us someone’s story while acknowledging that you only know the periphery. We still end the book feeling like we know the grandfather.

This collection is an extremely well-constructed combination of prose verse, free verse, and forms such as the pantoum and the abecedarian.

Some of my favorite lines:

“The land buries the thing we made to live just beyond the imagination”

“Colonial is a color”

“Sometimes a diamond replaces a heart”

I highly recommend this book to anyone whose love of poetry is accompanied by interests in history, biography, and science.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tyler Mills’s second collection of poems is an object lesson on how to mix the personal and the political, the present and the past. Written while the poet was living in New Mexico, Mills explores a set of spiraling connections between Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was developed, and a grandfather who was on the crew of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. She wants to explore the complex history of exploitation of the earth, and how war and violence impact individual consciousness. The fact that the poet was pregnant with her first child while writing these works indicates how complex and heart-felt these concerns about the world, and its past and future, were for her at the time. Never shrill or angry, these poems take us to a proviocative places, and encourage us to examine our own feelings in these landscapes.The cover image by Chris Maynard is also particularly striking.

[Ags · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the topic (thanks, Oppenheimer), research that went into this, and that this was clearly a Smart People Poetry Book. Dude, I just was not there: shame on me, I struggled to get into these poems. Shame on me times two, I think the length of some of these poems was too much for my plebian poetry-reading mind. As a lay person, as much as I liked that the poems all go together so clearly under the same umbrella, I didn't individually enjoy most of these.

One day, I may be stronger.

[sadie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“you arrive like an answer to a question i didn’t ask” (11). this was so beautiful and so haunting, i look forward to reading more by this poet

favorites i marked:
- reef
- guilt offering
- exposure
- reaction
- song for holding tanks in a vault
- yucca flat
- oath inked in the air with a crow-quill pen
- personal history

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite recent poetry reads: smart and beautiful all over the place! Highly recommend.