Book Review
Beasts for the Chase
Monica Ferrell
Sarabande Books, www.sarabandebooks.org
ISBN: 978-1-932511-65-9
2008. 89pp. US $ 14.95
Equipped with the authority of tradition, unleashed by the cruelty of her passion, Monica Ferrell’s debut collection, Beasts for the Chase (Sarabande Books, 2008) garners a lyricism infrequent not only among first books, but throughout the industry as a whole. Winner of the 2007 Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry, Beasts for the Chase combines the author’s personal experience with myth – with figures as classically familiar as Alexander the Great, to ones as intimate Ferrell’s own husband (we assume) in the shorter poem, “Homecoming” – to create a work of bold originality, sly cadence and noble contradiction.
In her foreword to the book, Jane Hirshfield (contest judge for the 2007 Morton Prize) refers to the books opening lines as “uncompromising,” stating that they range from the objective to the subjective “without apology.” Certainly this is true. Ferrell writes, “Tonight the lares have eaten their offerings. / The sweetbreads are gone, black kidneys / Infantine and nacred as mollusk-eggs.” The first line strikes with precision, its movement short and sweet – cutthroat, even. The second and third lines, however, provide us with our first (but far from last) Ferrellian juxtaposition. Just as she presents a diversity of subject matter, Ferrell’s syntax is largely varied, never allowing the reader to become bored – or even too comfortable; since Ferrell’s language remains unpredictable. Though they are not much longer than the first, the following lines, punctuated with a comma and cut with a line-break, force the audience to read at Ferrell’s pace. No faster, and no more slowly. Thus, she commands our attention, directs our eyes, and manages our reading with her pen.
In a poem entitled “Eleven Steps to Breaking up a Hart,” Ferrell makes use of the legendary Tristan (from Gottfried von Strassburg’s version of the tale), written in somewhat epistolary style, to convey both a sense of longing, as well as the displacement experienced as a stranger in a foreign land. Ferrell, from the voice of Tristan, writes:
Dear One, it is seven years this summer.
I have counted them out. I write you now
To say the thorn we thought removed has
Festered, and spread its gangrene in the blood.
Once again Ferrell’s lyricism mimics denotation, and her aesthetic rivals, even coincides with meaning. Of course the word “counted” incites our understanding of Tristan’s pining for Isolde. It arouses in the reader a feeling of empathy. The literal image of counting out the years, waiting, and longing, is certainly a familiar one to most. But moreover, the measured rhythm of the line – with only one word spanning more than a single syllable – does the counting for us. It is not perfectly iambic (stress falls on the first syllable of “count-ed”), and so it remains unconstrained; wild like the rest of Ferrell’s debut oeuvre.
Another piece materializes on a line from the journal of Norwegian Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun: “Then my passion broke out in other ways: I took to loving light. I assure you, it was an absolutely sensual love, a carnal lust…. I never understood Nero’s delight at the burning of Rome until then.” Hamsun goes on to explain that he caught his own curtains on fire just to watch them burn. The poem, “Knut Hamsun’s Night of Fire,” spoken from the voice of Hamsun himself, illustrates post-operatively both the ardor and the intellectualism of the act. Ferrell writes, “The curtains were so beautiful, my God; it was / Like being enveloped in velvet and rocked / To sleep.” Yes, we see the violence of Hamsun’s deed, and perhaps a trace of insanity; but it is on the foot-heels of violence that passion thrives in Beasts for the Chase. It liberates us from the confines of the mind, of social regulations and mores – and yet, it remains tethered with such intellectual force, such culture, that it simply cannot be regarded without acknowledging Ferrell’s insight into the chambers of the heart and mind. Beasts for the Chase is truly a breathtaking debut.
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