Reign of Snakes (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Robert Wrigley (Author)

Book Description

Series: Poets, Penguin | Publication Date: June 1, 1999

One of America's most accomplished poets takes his readers on an evocative journey in his latest collection. Described by the late James Dickey as "one of the finest new poets to come along in years," Robert Wrigley fulfills that early promise with this, his newest collection. Reign of Snakes is a book about desire, the soul's desire as much as the body's. As Jane Hirshfield said of Wrigley's previous book, In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995), "To read it is to unpeel a little further into the human, and into the wideness that holds the human--a splendid gift." Reign of Snakes takes us to yet another level, deep into the daily devotions, "where the dark blows a kiss to night."

. . . a frigid day in February and a full-grown rattlesnake curled to a comma in the middle of the middle of the just-plowed road. Ice ghost, I think, curve of rock or stubbed-off branch. But the diamonds are there, under a dust of crystals looming, impossible, summer's tattoo, the mythical argyle of evil. --from Reign of Snakes

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Memories and loves, and a knowledge of the Midwest's plants, insects and animals, combine in Wrigley's fifth collection to create an eccentric "bland, humdrum, quotidian guilt." Nature poems like those preceding each of the volume's four parts cram the landscape with highly wrought sonic and syntactic resonances (a plant is "a dessicate dump the strumpet sparrows/ spread far and wide"). But most often, the affected syntax surrounds more directly confessional moments of the hunter's peculiar agonies, as in the title poem: "And I have hacked rattlesnakes to bloody hunks,/ grunting my rage, and made with a single surgical blow/ a guillotine of the shovel's edge." By the end of poems like "Flies," "Hoarfrost," "Art" and "Prey" it doesn't much matter whether such violence is being critiqued or fetishized, as interest has long since waned. Shifting such interrogations of physicality to people, however, like the poet's wife and children, results in a bad fusion of Whitman, D. H. Lawrence and antiquarian porn: if after childbirth "her breasts, those lovely baubles, became/ mammary glands, lactate factories, unfirmed/ unto womanliness and not a bit less lovely." The results of such simplistic representations are condescending and baffling. At best, they bring one back to the piscatory eclogues and lush, self-involved phrasings of the Rhymer's Club. But unlike them, these poems don't seem to have anything to teach us about nature.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Wrigley is acutely aware of both his enmeshment within nature and his intellectual separation from it. Death and the slow rot and fade that follow intrigue him, and many poems are cued to scenes of animals in peril due to the actions of humans. A "sad moose" slowly succumbs to old age and starvation with an arrow lodged in his flank. A beaver is struck by a car. A buck is trapped in a barbed-wire fence. A wounded mouse stands stock-still surrounded by two cats and a dog. And then there are the snakes, both worshiped and murdered by men and women with equal fervor and conviction. Wrigley ponders what it is that we have that animals lack, and what animals have that we can only long for: their perfect fit with the cosmos. His unsentimental contemplation of nature's fecundity and the mythic trials of drought, flood, fire, and ice give rise to endless questions of faith. Dramatic and heady, Wrigley's transporting poems knit us tightly into the glistening web of life. Donna Seaman

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140589198
• ISBN-13: 978-0140589191
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,625,155 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Spellbinding, Beautiful, and true, October 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Reign of Snakes (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

There are poems in this book that go deeper into that place that poetry can go than the work of any other poet I've read in years. They make a good ache. They make you want what you can't quite imagine. They make you understand something you can't find the words for. But this poet could and did. Some of the poems are strange, but even when they are strange, they make you feel what one critic described as Wrigley's "delicious melancholy." It really is like being under a spell, and it's beautiful.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exquisite, Lyrical Tour de Force, August 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Reign of Snakes (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

Nobody sings like this poet. Maybe that's why the book seems so risky and wonderful to me: it seems like most poets these days are trying to write in the language of computer manuals--dull, dry, flat, and boring. Not Wrigley. His poems ring and soar like Mozart. And at the same time they mean something worth hearing. They can break your heart or make you laugh and often leave you speechless. Reign of Snakes is Wrigley's best book so far, the genuine article, a true jewel.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic!, December 17, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Reign of Snakes (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

Wrigley is a poet who speaks to all sorts of readers, not just a specialized few. His poems are usually very accessible, but not easy to put into other words, because they are so wonderfully written. Buy this book and read the poem "Conjure." It's as beautiful a love poem as you'll ever fine. Read the long series of poems that give the book its title: scary, exciting, and like all Wrigley's poems, beautiful. Even the italicized poems that are spaced through the book--they are impossible to paraphrase, but they are the kind of poems that make the hair on your neck stand up and chills slide down your spine. I can't wait for this poet's next book.