Redmouth by Claire Wahmanholm. Tinderbox Editions, 2019. 92 pp. $16.00 (paperback)

Part pastoral, part wake-up call, Claire Wahmanholm’s Redmouth ushers us into a shadowy Arcadia, a half-surreal, half-devastated dreamscape that belongs only to this book, and perhaps Andrey Tarkovsky’s films. It is “a land of darkness…where the light is as // darkness” (“Maelstrom”).

The Miltonic echo here reverberates throughout the book, placing these poems somewhere in the dark woods (Dante is there too) between Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. What better mood for our moment, when a new kind of ecological exile may have only just begun? Read “Termination Shock,” one of my favorite poems in the volume, and see not Adam or Eve, but yourself, ourselves, with wandering steps, taking our solitary way:

Somewhere behind us is something like a sun.
We have stopped riding our fevers and they have stopped
          running, have broken through some tall fence
          and are grazing on the other side.
We are sweating, still expecting the sun to appear
          and burn our faces with its face.
As if anything could ever love us that bluntly again.

Pastoral poetry may well become the dominant mode of the millenium. Already we’ve seen Carl Phillip’s Pastoral (2002), Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s The Orchard (2004), Maurice Manning’s Bucolics (2008), and Wahmanholm’s own Wilder (2018), all of which in some way map a path between the Edens of our memory and whatever broken Edens we may yet salvage.

Redmouth is darker than all of these. It is not only pastoral, but pastoral elegy. It reminds us that paradise is never quite (or even remotely) paradise, that a nymph’s love is rarely requited, and that out there in all that darkness there are wolves.

Of course there are. Watching for wolves is, after all, what shepherds are for. All great pastorals are therefore also anti-pastorals, mingling a terror of the natural world with veiled celebrations of culture, art, urbanity, technology, comfort; the advancement of civilization; our redemption from “the natural.” Think of Touchstone’s invectives against Arden, and how his fellow exiles rejoice to return to the court. Think of Wilde’s weird modern eclogue “The Decay of Lying,” with its exclamation: “If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture.”

This ambivalence toward nature is not just a symptom of modernity; it finds expression in our oldest poems. Theocritus’ Idyll I (a touchstone text for Redmouth) knows that death is irreversible, love synonymous with sorrow (“Where were you, Nymphs, when Daphnis came to grief?”), and that nature preserves itself through violence: “Gently, my goats, / Down! or you’ll have the billy goat force you down.”

No, humans aren’t quite natural enough to belong to nature, our amputation from it remains an open wound, and pastoral poetry has been an ongoing record of that wound.

Wounded Redmouth certainly is, and points to language as both cause and cure:

To stop myself from choking on the tongue of my own loneliness,

I carried a groan in my throat. Mostly it sat silent, but at night

I untethered it note by note. […]It made a moat around me

with its moaning[…]

One day I put a blade to my throat and begged the groans to stop

but they only became coyotes howling at the dome of my skull.
                                                            (“Breach”)

Hence the dualling stylistic modes of the book, as if the speakers can’t decide if less is better (as above), or more, a language festooned with touches of Hopkins:

Fallow the field into its summer, into its faun-colored heat,
its tall, feathery yarrow.
                                  Look down at the untilled clouds breathing
in the pond, where water is so shallow and shallowless it’s hot.
                                                            (“Fallow”)

This ambivalence towards its own medium is yet another link Redmouth makes to its tradition. In a discussion of Empson’s Some Versions of the Pastoral, Paul de Man makes the following claim: “What is the pastoral convention, then, if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural?…There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme, that it is poetry itself.” The same tension is what makes Redmouth feel like “poetry itself”: language as a kind of beautiful disease.

And so we begin to understand what is implied by the title: that our first wound was words, that since language cuts us off from prelapsarian oneness, all utterances are in a sense bloodstained, bloodborn. Wahmanholm: “In the mirror I watch / my mouth redden at the margins like a poisoned pond” (“The Valley”). These poems (maybe all poems) are spoken from “a point / of departure, / a puncture, / origin of / a wound” (“Given”).

This tension also explains the book’s central aesthetic strategy: erasure, an apocalypse, or near apocalypse, of effacement, of fading out, of deletion. Look at the poems’ titles: “Fallow,” “Breach,” “Absolute Zero,” Meltwater,” “Fissure,” “Black Comets,” “Null,” “Gravity Well.” Look at their forms, their wide spacing, a world flooded in blankness and white. Look at the speakers, constantly disappearing: “I run down- // hill into a hollow // and become lake, lakebed, bed- // rock numb beneath the water table” (“Meltwater”).

Look most of all at the erasures of Virgil and Theocritus:

VIRGIL

The muse of the shepherd Alphesiboeus and Damon,
At whose contending songs the very cattle
Were spellbound in the field, forgetting to graze—
The lynx was spellbound too, hearing the music—
And the rivers, spellbound, stood still listening—
I sing the Muse of Damon and Alphesiboeus.
Whether it be that you are passing by
The great rocks at the mouth of the river Timavus
Or sailing homeward along the Illyrian coast,
I long for the day when I shall be able to sing
In celebration of your victories,
And celebrate to all the world as well
Your Sophoclean music. These songs of mine,
In my beginning, are for you; and when
I come to the end, it shall be in your service.
Accept these songs written at your command;
May these few ivy leaves be among your laurels.

I usually balk at stuff like this: too gimmicky, too disposable. And to vie with Virgil for a reader’s attention is downright foolhardy. But the risk here feels worth it, and as an analog for ecological effacement these erasures feel too apt to ignore. The effect is not affectation, but urgency. Or else love. A desire to hold on, even as everything fades away, vanishing like a wind—as Virgil might say—or a shadowy dream.

Erasure as a form feels particularly apt for pastorals, a mode that has always evoked “a world / that keeps pulling away from you (“Nativity, Redshift”). Who hasn’t, since the fall, longed “to come to the end”? To erase the distance between ourselves and our environment? And who doesn’t, these days, wonder how much of our planet will remain? So we imagine Arcadias where humans are not, or where humans are mostly not: the opposite of cities, what the world may have been before we fell into it, atlases “in which [we] no longer appear” (“Redmouth”), “[a] ghost of zero…multiplying everything by itself” (“Haunt”).

The result is a kind of trap or paradox: to make nature interpretable, one must transform it into art; one must, in a sense, erase it. But this erasure expels us anew, makes us exiles from the versions of nature we have created. Here is where the ghost of Rilke hovers most closely, reminding us “we are not really at home in our interpreted world” (Duino Elegy 1). “This is no longer your orchard, / sigh your lungs,” writes Wahmanholm in “Breach,” “[t]his is no longer your nest of grass…you wish you were made for this.” Nature is terrifying, and our injuries to it are terrifying: “You are soon to be / un-created, unsutured from your pasture blade by blade. / Why aren’t you running. Why aren’t you afraid” (“Breach”).

Fear, erasure, darkness. And yet. Redmouth is not a pessimistic book. A red mouth is, after all, beautiful, flush with desire, stained with fruit, capable of beautiful sounds. Language is good. Poetry can soothe—why else would all those shepherds spend so much time singing, and demanding of each other more and more beautiful songs? The hope of Redmouth lies in its insistence on this beauty, on love despite grief, despite Daphnis always slipping endlessly away. Hope, too, in its reinvention of tradition, in proving the pastoral has not been exhausted. Contra Dr. Johnson (“Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting”), Redmouth reminds us there is something in this genre we need, something that must be regained, something that could (maybe) save us and our Earth. Or at least make it a place worth saving.

Thus, Wahmanholm gives us a double gift: eclogues for our age, our climate, our wound, and also a reminder that this wound is the old wound, that our worries are human worries, that there is nothing new under the sun, and that there is a reservoir of art which can inform us how to act in this most urgent of moments, this most polluted of times. The dominant mode of the book may be lapsarian, but its fall isn’t so much historical, as projected, futuristic, hypothetical; almost optional; maybe—maybe—reversible. A destruction we “may or may not be dreaming” (“Nativity, Redshift”).

This dream depends, Redmouth implies, on us, on our imagination and our language. In short, on our poetry. To will our salvation we have to imagine well:

I used to watch for deer, but they have disappeared.
When I close my eyes I can see them
licking the coats of their fawns, anchoring
their spots to their fur to their bodies to the forest floor.
                                                            (“Dehiscence”)

And then we need to speak well:

All shall be well,         and all shall be well,
[…]
                      and if we call from the bottom

of a well, who shall hear, and what shall

haul us out       but our own hands…
                                                            (“Prayer”)

The Earth is ours to save; to dream and speak back into health. If we have a future it will be one of our creation, it will come from our vision: “Lie low and let the swallows pick you clean. / When the future arrives it will rise willow-green from your yellow eyes” (“Fallow”). Paradise may have been lost, but some pieces of that paradise, some of its willow-green, can be regained.