{"id":5968,"date":"2020-12-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/floridareview.cah.ucf.edu\/?post_type=article&p=5968"},"modified":"2020-12-16T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T09:00:00","slug":"a-game-of-hide-and-seek-with-the-world","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/a-game-of-hide-and-seek-with-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"A Game of Hide-and-Seek with the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wild<\/em> Persistence<\/em> by Patricia Hooper<\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Tampa Press, 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paperback, 100 pages, $14.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Wild<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patricia Hooper\u2019s fifth book of poems, Wild Persistence,\u00a0<\/em>is a beautiful and moving collection, mixing, as it does, dark and light, grief and wonder, and engaging us in her world, which includes the world of nature. Her forms range from haiku with surprising turns to blank verse that is plain and elegant. Her range is unusual\u2014she gives us graceful poems, witty poems, complex ones, and powerful ones.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cSightings\u201d is a poem that demanded my attention from the first reading:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The world leafs out again, the willow first<\/p>\n

and then the river birches near the road<\/p>\n

we\u2019re driving down, you in your car seat watching,<\/p>\n

for hawks or smaller birds returning home.<\/p>\n

Two years have passed since you could walk or stand<\/p>\n

alone.\u00a0 The winter-damaged fields are sown,<\/p>\n

and there, along the ridge, unraveling,<\/p>\n

spirals of song birds, drifts of dogwood trees,<\/p>\n

restored to blossom, beauty that breaks the heart.<\/p>\n

And you whose spinal cord could not be healed:<\/p>\n

you\u2019re lowering the window, looking up<\/p>\n

at miles of wings, your face alive with joy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

As we\u2019re drawn into this car drive in spring, a bird-watching trip, the language is quiet, not calling attention to itself. Then those \u201cwinter-damaged fields that now are sown\u201d make their entrance. The \u201cyou\u201d is the speaker\u2019s paralyzed grandson. Hooper has raised the stakes, and we feel her urgency with the \u201cdrifts of dogwood trees,\u201d an injury that \u201ccould not be healed,\u201d heart-breaking beauty, \u201cmiles of wings, your face alive with joy.\u201d Clear images, deep feeling\u2014the grandson\u2019s wonder and the speaker\u2019s joy and gratitude\u2014this poem is also a gift to the reader in the way it finds beauty in the natural world even in the face of tragedy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The word beauty<\/em> sometimes takes a beating in the streets. I met a well-known poet who said in a disparaging way, Nay-chuh poems,<\/em> as if it were a skin condition he thought had long ago been cured. However, Hooper\u2019s poems go beyond the simple observational nature poem. Often, she starts with the plainest things. For example, in the book\u2019s first poem, \u201cSketchbook and Journal,\u201d she catalogues items found in her friend Dan\u2019s freezer: \u201cbirds found dead along the trail \/ in snow ruts, autumn\u2019s crevices, the wren \/ almost mistaken for a leaf.\u201d The poem moves to Dan\u2019s essays, other \u201csightings, swift details \/ that can\u2019t be seen in flight, wild, secretive, \/ a voice, a look, a gesture half-concealed.\u201d It ends with \u201cwing-bars and stripes, the margins of a feather, \/ what the mind salvages to study later.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In other poems, Hooper gives us an elegy for a son-in-law, a move from Michigan to the Piedmont, news of a grandson\u2019s accident, a copperhead, nine birds, a spider, and an evening at a country inn. In a sometimes-witty haiku sequence, Hooper says, \u201cI left those three crows, \/ the last corn in my garden, \/ and not one thanked me.\u201d In \u201cMy Junco,\u201d the bird has hit the speaker\u2019s picture window with its \u201cslate feathers and soft gray throat,\u201d and she buries it by \u201cthose Whirlwind anemones \/ I planted under the oak tree \/ beside him\u2014 \/ next summer\u2019s wings.\u201d A hopeful, quiet walk-off.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cAugust in the Little Field,\u201d Hooper\u2019s speaker addresses us and asks if we have \u201cever heard of a purpose as clear as this one . . ., the resolute persistence\u201d of this goldfinch that all spring \u201cflew back and forth over the meadow, watching,\u201d then fed her offspring seeds all summer, as if\u00a0knowing \u201cthe fields and their bright design. . . ,\u201d \/ . . . her faith so simple \/ I could only wish it were mine.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hooper has aptly personified the bird and attached human fate to it. The poet Erin Belieu has said that Hooper\u2019s feeling for nature reminds her of Mekeel McBride, who in fact provided a blurb for one of Hooper\u2019s earlier books: \u201cCraft and vision here, lighting from the inside the most common things.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hooper\u2019s vision is complex, and this leads her to take a surprising point of view sometimes. In \u201cCopperhead,\u201d she writes in third-person about this snake about to strike in her garden\u2014\u201cits orange head lifted, \/ body a silk rope, \/ the hourglass bands around it like a bracelet.\u201d These images are precise, almost pretty, but this speaker steps back for a shovel, thrusts it down, and the snake hesitates,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

not long enough to see the rims of trees,<\/p>\n

to see the houses leaning toward the hills,<\/p>\n

to see the hills far off, the gray blue mountain,<\/p>\n

to see the pink crepe myrtle in the yard,<\/p>\n

to see the front porch with its pail of berries,<\/p>\n

to see my knees blue-stained from berry picking,<\/p>\n

to see the bare skin shining at my ankle,<\/p>\n

to see, if it sees at all, the chance before it,<\/p>\n

to see what I might see for the last time,<\/p>\n

if no one came . . .<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is one of Hooper\u2019s signature moments. The snake, almost outside of time, is allowed its point of view. The gaze moves to the sky, as if to evoke all the things the copperhead will lose. The feeling of distance here is odd, making the world slide sideways. The blank verse\u2014easily readable and at the same time carefully crafted with alliteration, other sound ladders, and anaphora\u2014gives an odd formality to the scene. The idea is complex, the language is plain.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Spider,\u201d we see \u201cblowsy \/ overblown roses, heavy as hydrangeas,\u201d then an empty spider web \u201ctattered but glistening\u201d in the speaker\u2019s garden. \u201cIt\u2019s strange, something dies, and the world stays,\u201d she says. The speaker goes back in her mind to her childhood lake\u2014not to the lake really, but to this moment after she, a girl, has returned to school in the fall and pictures \u201cthe dock, the sand\u2019s hard ridges, and the waves still there without me, lapping at the shore.\u201d This memory re-imagined, a frame inside the frame, gives this moment a poignant, unearthly quality.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Hooper has played this hide-and-seek game with the world throughout her previous four books. This strategy of up-close and far-away is a key to her craft and vision. In her first book, Other Lives,<\/em> we have a surprisingly effective second-person point of view in \u201cA Child\u2019s Train Ride,\u201d where the speaker is able to perceive the child\u2019s thoughts about existence and non-existence. Now in Wild Persistence,<\/em> we have \u201cIn the Clearing,\u201d where Hooper\u2019s speaker sits in the woods after rain, studying the light: \u201cIf I sit still enough \/ by the damp trees, sometimes I see the world without myself in it, \/ and\u2014it always surprises me\u2014nothing at all is lost!\u201d No matter where she is in her own life trajectory, Hooper seems able to imagine the world without herself and her loved ones.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We also get powerful autobiographical poems mourning a loss, such as “After,\u201d which begins, \u201cAfter I left your body to be burned . . .\u201d In a matter-of fact way, the speaker catalogues all of the details she has had to take care of. The poem ends with this speaker looking down from a great distance at all of the things in a house, as \u201cif she were looking back from the next world,\u201d an ending which seems to slam the door shut.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes her humor rests alongside solace. In \u201cSandhill Cranes,\u201d two birds walk up to her window \u201cin their scarlet caps.\u201d The male sees his reflection and begins dancing: \u201chis wings six feet across, \/ rose in the air \/ as he leapt in his black leather slippers, \/ his coat of feathers, \/ and pranced like an Iroquois brave to impress his bride.\u201d The narrator expresses wonder and delight at their unusual \u201cbowing and strutting\u201d thinking \u201cit was just in time \/ <\/em>that they found their way to the house \/ in which I was grieving, . . .\u201d gently reminding the reader of the poet\u2019s loss.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

There are some very witty poems in this book, too. In the heat of Hooper\u2019s newly adopted South, her speaker says she sometimes thinks of \u201cheroines \/ in southern plays or novels: sultry, steamy \/ women whose ways I didn\u2019t understand \/ before\u2014like Blanche du Bois reclining in a chair, \/ restless, desirous, half-daft, but barely able \/ to rise, to lift a hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to find any weaknesses to comment on, even beyond the particular aspects focused on here. Although I haven\u2019t discussed Hooper\u2019s poems that address the world\u2019s injustices, they take their place in the story of her poetics and have contributed to the fact that her books have won a number of awards, including the Norma Farmer First Book Award,\u00a0Bluestem Award, Lawrence Goldstein Award for Poetry from Michigan Quarterly Review,\u00a0<\/em>and most recently, for Wild Persistence,<\/em>\u00a0the Brockman Campbell Book Award from the Poetry Society of North Carolina. This book deserves such widespread recognition. And, perhaps, a re-examination of how far nature poems can actually take us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wild Persistence by Patricia Hooper University of Tampa Press, 2019 Paperback, 100 pages, $14.00     Patricia Hooper\u2019s fifth book of poems, Wild Persistence,\u00a0is a beautiful and moving collection, mixing, as it does, dark and light, grief and wonder, and engaging us in her world, which includes the world of nature. Her forms range from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5969,"template":"","categories":[9,139],"tags":[6,347,1745,1746],"class_list":["post-5968","article","type-article","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aquifer","category-book-review","tag-aquifer-the-florida-review-online","tag-book-review","tag-richard-widerkehr","tag-wild-persistence"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Game of Hide-and-Seek with the World - The Florida Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cah.ucf.edu\/floridareview\/article\/a-game-of-hide-and-seek-with-the-world\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Game of Hide-and-Seek with the World - The Florida Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Wild Persistence by Patricia Hooper University of Tampa Press, 2019 Paperback, 100 pages, $14.00     Patricia Hooper\u2019s fifth book of poems, Wild Persistence,\u00a0is a beautiful and moving collection, mixing, as it does, dark and light, grief and wonder, and engaging us in her world, which includes the world of nature. 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