Sonnets have come a long way from Petrarch and Shakespeare, or even Edna St. Vincent Millay. Wendy S. Walters’s Birds of Los Angeles shows how nimble the form has become, and how adaptable to different terrain. Walters eschews traditional metrical precision for verbal texture and a more fluent, almost spoken-word, rhythm. These poems demand to be read aloud, the words formed carefully with lips, and tongue, and teeth. “Love Letter to the Freeway,” which compares the freeway to “how a snake swallows a snake,” includes these chewy lines: “A fetish to break/history, I say: Mine? When? Aperture: molten dross,/venom, laughter and flesh-eating orchids.” Walters depicts an America (“wherever that is”) and its institutions, like highways, cheap entertainment, and the Wild West, alongside landscape and the natural world, but it is never a simple people = bad and nature = good scenario. The carnivorous Cobra orchid and the mythical Chupacabra are both presented as poignant metaphors for human beings in their relations with other humans and with nature. El Chupacabra leaves Puerto Rico for California “to redeem [him]self” before a vision of the Virgin Mary, but concludes, “I know overt/answers, like miracles or monsters, are rare. And most are shown/on TV or at the movies, rarely appearing in plain air.” The ultimate tragedy, Walters seems to suggest, is that Americans love to destroy what they love. From “Either I Stay Home and Watch a War on TV”:
[…] so I take aim at the sky, only my eye
to tell me what is fear or dear. I shoot at words: sparrows,
eagles and jays. Pelicans, egrets and gulls. Gnatcatchers.
I shoot down birds in defense of my right to say this
song is not about love but is love itself, all the little deaths.
The twenty-three poems in this collection are like the rare birds, monsters, and carnivorous flowers Walters evokes: they are deceptively small; curiously strange; and, sometimes, vicious. |
Birds of Los Angeles
