Raven Raves, Rants, Reviews and Listings
Peter Pereira’s Saying the World
(2003 Copper Canyon Press)
By Jeannine Hall Gailey
Saying the World, an understated but wrenching collection by Dr. Peter Pereira, won the prestigious 2002 Hayden Carruth Award. Neither experimental nor gaudy, these narrative poems display deeply personal, powerful emotions with a tremendous force of language. Copper Canyon has given us a gift that is rare these days: a book of poetry that rewards us without resorting to hat tricks, simply by laying open (literally and figuratively) the human heart. Sam Hamill is quoted on the back of the book saying that “the poems seem absolutely inevitable,” and this is true. Each word Pereira writes seems like the only possible word, and each line seems like the only possible line.The collection is divided into three sections. The first focuses on the speaker’s experiences as a doctor, the second on the speaker’s childhood and the death of his young sister, and the third on the daily life and loves of a contemporary gay man. Dark themes intertwine the sections. The opening poem of the book, “Fetus Papyraceous,” reveals one of the themes with a description of the phenomenon of one fetus twin absorbing the other when it dies. Babies cry in the background of these poems, they die unborn, they remind the speaker of his dead sister, of the fact that he is childless, of the lost “other.” Flowers and plants also seem to grow around the lines of the poems, funereal flowers, Elm seedpods lurk mysteriously, and are addressed directly in “The Birth of Flowers:”
it’s all genetics, natural selection, survival
of the fittest—but can’t explain
the sudden appearance of flowers.
So fragile and so useless,
of no great purpose, no obvious advantage.
and bluebirds hummed in the honeysuckle,
the baby began to nestle
its soft cranium into her pelvis’
narrow doorway, and she knew
the day was near…
Belly empty and shriveled,
breasts swollen with milk,
she is a bleeding woman with no baby
to feed, to comfort. Her empty house
slowly filling with flowers.
The tragic story is told with such grace that I found myself repeating the lines after each reading. A similar phenomenon occurs in a poem from his second section, “Suite for a Sister.” This poem is separated into five parts. Here is the third, “I Dream My Sister is Abducted by Aliens,” strange and lovely. Juxtaposed to the other parts of the poem, which lyrically mourn the loss of a five-year-old sister who dies of diabetes, this one reminds jumps out with its “X-Files” sensibilities:
“Our family is camping at Larrabee State Park when we wake up to find she is gone. My father examines the long slit cut cleanly with a laser in the tent side, gaping open like a fish mouth. They even took her sleeping bag! At first I am afraid, but it’s daytime and the aliens have vanished. My mother wants to look for her but we have to eat breakfast first and there is no milk, only little boxes of dry cereal, each one lying on its back with its front cut open.”
The creepy aptness of those cereal boxes is just one example of Pereira’s use of moody, pitch-perfect details to invoke fear, alienation, and grief. His unrushed, narrative lines give weight to each of these details, causing us to linger over each evocation.
Copper Canyon Press has produced this book in a time when we are daily confronted with the horrors of mortality, loneliness, and an apparent lack of order in the universe. Reading though these poems helps us pick up the petals, the instances of beauty strewn through a catalog of tragedy.
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a Seattle-area writer who has a Master's Degree in English from the University of Cincinnati and has published in the Seattle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Melic Review, Northwest Palate Magazine, and other places. She is also the web editor of the Raven Chronicles site. Visit her site at www.webbish6.com or feel free to contact her at webbish6@hotmail.com.