Writing Toward Healing
IN SEARCH OF “WONDERS HIDDEN AND HUGE” a review by James W. Kirkland Peg Bresnahan. Hunger to Share: Poems. Press 53, 2019.
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Following a course similar to that of her previous book, In a Country None of Us Called Home (2014), Peg Bresnahan’s latest collection, Hunger to Share, skillfully blends almost fifty new and previously published poems in five thematically grouped sections: “Picking Threads off a Lover,” “Wonders Hidden and Huge,” “Fringe of Magic Carpet,” “The Other Side of Air,” and “Enormous Things.” The borders between sections, however, are extremely fluid, the poems in one part linked overtly or implicitly with those preceding and following, all of them inviting us to join her on what she describes in the book’s dedication as “life’s surprising journey.” Nowhere is this boundary crossing more evident than in the frequent iterations of the phrase “hunger to share.” We see it first on the cover of the book, which depicts a scene from the flower-candle ceremony later described in the poem “Rickshaw through the Night: Varanasi,” and there are notable variations in two earlier poems, “Picking Threads from a Lover” – where a lovers’ quarrel ends with the speaker imagining her love “leaping out open windows, / loose on the macadam, hungry for air” – and “Knife Lake” – where a camping trip “up in the Boundary Waters” of the Great Lakes reveals the “miracles [that] surround us”: . . . I woke my tent mate. We sat at the edge of Knife Lake zipped in sleeping bags, sipped wine . . . until Aurora Borealis unplugged. If I’m the last creature alive, no matter what shape earth is in, and I discover a wonder hidden or huge, I know I’ll panic, break into an icy sweat with the hunger to share. My tongue will swell with the intensity of untelling.
JAMES W. KIRKLAND has taught in the East Carolina University Department of English for over fifty years. His reviews and articles on subjects ranging from Melville’s literary uses of tall tale tradition to composition pedagogy and magico-religious healing traditions have appeared in English Language Notes, Medium Aevum, Western Folklore, North Carolina Folklore Journal, Tar River Poetry, and other journals. He has co-authored or co-edited seven books, including Writing with Confidence: A Modern College Rhetoric (Heath, 1989), Herbal and Magical Medicine: Traditional Healing Today (Duke University Press, 1992) and Concise English Handbook, 4th ed. (Houghton, 1997). PEG BRESNAHAN graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. Her poetry has appeared in Kakalak, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and The Great Smokies Review. The poet has been a finalist twice in the James Applewhite Poetry Prize, and her poems have been published in NCLR Online 2016 and 2017. She lives in Cedar Mountain, NC.
Other “wonders hidden and huge” are in fact pervasive in all sections of the book, conveyed in language rich in sensory details: the sight of sandhill cranes – “slate gray, / the male with crimson crown” – feeding along the shore of a mountain lake, where “coontail and duckweed thicken” and the “birds’ footsteps send watery rings” (“Lake Clara”); the “mesmerizing tremolo / of loons, dawn’s frescoed sky – / birch and spruce netted with mist” (“Chicken Bone Lake”); “the taste of plunder, / the sound of hooves / as they paw, maraud,” (“Portent”); “volts of dry lightning” that “split the seams of night” (“Skin”); the “clear pool above the falls” on Buckhorn Creek that “mirrors hemlocks, sweet gums, chinquapins” (“Small Piece of the World”); and “Mekong’s Golden Triangle,” where “Fairy bush flowers cascade over cliffs, rocks tall / as temples stand along shore or in the water” (“World of One Thousand Greens”).