Philp Rush reviews Robert Wrigley’s The True Account of Myself as a Bird
Robert Wrigley The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022)
Robert Wrigley’s book The True Account of Myself as a Bird is a breath of fresh air for stale old me. The poems are elegant and friendly though they maintain an edge, and they shape a welcome stance towards liberalism, justice and respect. They do not hurry the reader to the next page. They do not puzzle unnecessarily: all these puzzles are delights. They have a slow dawdle to them, someone on a stroll pointing things out to a friend. But in the end, when the reflection is done for the moment and the imagery is resting, they are a call for action, for social justice, for equality and generosity, for nature and the sanctity of the natural world.
The poems have a strong sense of place. The place is usually, but not always, austere mountain land in north Idaho, which on a small-scale map is close to the Canadian border, and on a local map, is mingled into the tree-line on the slopes of Moscow mountain; in a book-shack, what’s more, which affords intimacy with those huge, wild animals of the American west: bison, moose, elk, whitetail deer, porcupines, with many birds and (apparently only once) with a wolverine.
There is a black swallowtail butterfly in the poem “Be Glad” (on page eight) where the poem is playing a guitar on the porch—She Loves You by The Beatles—and there the swallowtail butterfly is “exclusively a Beatles fan”. The attention to detail is disarming and precise, and typical of the book as a whole. The guitarist’s fingers, “knuckles, wedding band, the wound / on the back of my left / index finger”, the butterfly’s “black tongue or proboscis”, and “a pair of cedar waxwings” are all paid close and proper attention. The song becomes “not exactly a sad song”, my favourite sort. There is something a little oddly attractive about tiny key phrases lifted from old songs and put there in front of you: “Be Glad”. It’s a small poem of its own, that title. And those of us who play Beatles albums in the same way we take statins, only missing a day now and then, give a little nod to the “sad song” drifting in from Hey Jude. And we read the poem again, noting the two time frames: the song day and the poem day, the guitar day and the “red mechanical pencil” day.
The elegies for Wrigley’s father are stand-out tracks on a great LP. That pencil stands as a tool with which work is undertaken and Wrigley loves a bit of workshop, as his father did before him. After his father’s death, Wrigley appears to have cleared away many unusable and unused old tools but, in “Machinery”, which recites a fine litany of traditional tools, we are told, “a few I have kept in remembrance”. The archaic construction reflects admirably the archaic craftsmanship they represent. For Wrigley, the reader suspects, the “red mechanical” pencil is a “machine that makes the machines”; William Carlos Williams, we are reminded, said that “a poem is a … machine made of words” (and Auden had it that a poem was a “verbal contraption”).
This is machinery with a sense of humour.
The poem “The Flower of All Water”, which is in part an elegy for Theodore Roethke, is a summation of the values of this poetry: “Sing awhile. Accentuate the silence.” (The simple precision of the word, “accentuate” there.) “Lie down beside [your own bones] until happiness lies with you.”
The book ends with two wonderful pieces, firstly a tour de force about the assassination of Kennedy, She Said, which nods quietly to Bob Dylan’s Murder Most Foul (at least, it does the way I read it), and then a poem in which a deer is the important audience to a quiet and reflective rendering of The Beatles’ She Loves You, a song which hasn’t been “played since page eight”. (Dylan, in his long song about the assassination, remember, reassures us that “The Beatles are comin', they're gonna hold your hand.”)
The American singer-songwriter Chris Smither performs a wonderful version of The Beatles’ song She Said She Said; he uses the same gentle and melancholy finger-picking style said in this this poem to be the ideal way to play, when you’re playing for a quiet deer somewhere beyond the prairies. Worth a listen. And the final lines of Wrigley’s book go like this:
… and the worst thing
that could happen at such a time is for the song to end.
So I keep on singing “She loves you, yeah-yeah-yeah.”
Philip Rush was born and grew up in Middlesex. He taught English in Gloucestershire schools for forty years. He has been running an independent poetry press, Yew Tree Press, for a number of years and hosts regular poetry events at the Museum in the Park. Philip is a member of Dialect’s advisory group, has taught on Dialect courses (Throwing Clay, Poetry Journaling, Poetic Form I & II, Genius Loci Retreat and more) and led a poetry walk along the Wye in July 2021. Philip’s own poems have been in several British and Irish magazines and in anthologies from Carcanet, Bloodaxe and Seren.
