Reign of Snakes (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Robert Wrigley is a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. His sixth and most recent book, Lives of the Animals, won the 2004 Poets’ Prize.

His first two books recently reprinted by the Univ. of Illinois Press, the Idaho-based Wrigley, in his fifth, again proves why he earned the imprimatur of the late James Dickey. Wrigleys harsh and raw verse exults in its masculinity, and in the toughness of nature: his wife, in one poem, smells the testosterone in the images of heavy equipment floating downriver after a flood. But this and other bouts of sappinessespecially in poems about his childrenshouldnt distract from Wrigleys strength in poems that re-create in their sounds natures gutturals: his compound word-hoards rely on all the non-metrical devices (assonance, consonance, alliteration, internal rhymes) to capture the brutality on display all around him in the West. Many of these poems locate him in the wilderness, as vigilist, eulogist, and even savior. Both Whitman and the Bible lurk behind his long lines, and a number of his longer narratives are printed in italics, alerting us to the heightened language: in The Afterlife, he aspires to the stillness of the heron; in Amazing Grace, his admitted yawp sounds good, but meanders like Dickey at his incoherent worst; in Meditation at Bedrock Canyon, another self-conscious nod to Whitman, he celebrates the forest medieval; and the last one, The Name, witnesses the birth of his son, exhibiting the poets sensitivity. The most memorable sequence, though, is the title section, nine narratives with snakes in them, from a portrait of a religious snakehandler to the memory of a beautiful woman next door in his youth, who snapped a copperhead dead with one whip. The creepiest section puns on the title of the volumea literal rain of snakes drops down on an earthmover that hits upon a den. Ophidiphobes beware: others will tire of Wrigleys pantheistic excess, and his expansive need to embrace even bathos. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.