Derek Walcott ends his poem “Sea Grapes” with the famous assertion that “The classics can console. But not enough,” a sharp assessment of what the classics can offer contemporary readers and the inherent complexity of these texts that we have returned to for thousands of years. And sure enough, Forester McClatchey’s Killing Orpheus compellingly makes the case that in our current moment the classics have more to offer than consoling alone. As someone reading Killing Orpheus quickly comes to understand, the classics instead serve a much more immediate function as warnings, diagnoses, and containers for reflection that might help us see more clearly what we face in our own time. With this approach the collection avoids the romantic pull into simplified, more-palatable versions of our rich cultural inheritances, finding, as we so often hope when returning to the classics, something new and essential within them.
To get a sense of McClatchey’s approach to the classics, take the haunting description that opens Isaac’s account of his near-sacrifice in “Isaac’s Memory”: “What I remember most is the desperate grin/ my father wore, his lips retracted, his teeth/ moon-white against the ruddy, fissured skin.” Or the bleakness of the ending of “Elephant in Hannibal’s Army”: “My mind falls down, skies descend,/ and all the uphill, hell-white world caves in.” Or this section of “Penelope, Growing Old,” wherein the speaker brings us up to date on her relationship with Odysseus long after the tribulations of The Odyssey have come to an end: “Odysseus can’t chew./ My love pisses desultory and often./ He recalls me less and less.”
Each moment here is visceral, evocative both intellectually and emotionally, and almost immediately moves past the consoling present in the retelling of a familiar story into contemplation or recognition of deeper truths. What is found in these myths and histories of antiquity is their honest, brutal assessment of human life. And while there are times throughout Killing Orpheus that we are consoled, this is rarely the point. As they have always done, the classics grant insight: how belief can be all-consuming (“Isaac’s Memory”); or the effects of our cruel imposition into the natural world (“Elephant in Hannibal’s Army”); or how the heroics of myth-making can seductively take over the truth of our human lives, which are ultimately impermanent (“Penelope, Growing Old”). Issues that, despite the great age of the texts we find them in, speak directly to our current moment.
The collection’s first poem, “Alpine Meadow,” helps key us into why McClatchey’s speakers focus on these ideas. After an opening octet about the inhospitability of the alpine meadow, the sonnet turns:
goodness: archaic and embarrassing
as rhyme, fragile as an eyelid skin,
and just as loath to grow. Take a cutting
of the sorry thing, fly it home, coddle it in
a warm glass, and see: without ice
and wind and punishment, it dies.
If the classics come up short as a source of consoling, nature, by comparison, can aptly do the job. This stanza invites us into the world of the poem, something that has been carefully kept at bay in the opening octet: “The tourists yawn and drive into a cloud, already bored by what eludes belief.” In other words, if we as readers are struggling under ice, we would do well to remember the flower in this poem, how it is goodness manifested, how goodness is “archaic and embarrassing” and “fragile,” but created under “wind and punishment.” Things that seem difficult or hard for us might actually be the sources of our goodness, if we look to nature as a guide. There is your consolation, the poems in this collection seem to argue, accentuated by the world’s reality.
The combination of the natural and classical textures is ultimately what gives the collection its sense of structure. The dynamic created between these two different approaches playing out across poems, at times even within them, works in tandem to help us better understand our own place in contemporary life. Though there is clear reverence for both subjects in Killing Orpheus, the poems also suggest that nature is the easier of the two to trust. McClatchey’s take on the story of Isaac shows us the type of threat the flowers in “Alpine Meadow” have learned to thrive in, and even need—a juxtaposition the collection makes by placing these two poems, “Alpine Meadow” then “Isaac’s Memory,” as the opening two pieces. Brutality in the human world strikes the register of a puzzle, while in the natural world it is presented as fact, like the soil or temperature that must be survived. The natural world’s certainty, hard as it is, offers something to latch onto; the human realm’s capacity for cruelty, however, is not governed by a natural law, and this leads to a more complicated and difficult type of reckoning with uncertainty.
In reading Killing Orpheus, I’m often reminded of the early Christian theological notion of the Book of Nature, an attentive exploration and consideration of the natural world (i.e. creation) that allows the beholder to better understand divine truths. It is my understanding that the Book of Nature has fallen out of favor compared to the Book of Scripture, but for the speakers in Killing Orpheus the inverse seems true. The texts—the classics, what we would identify more with the scriptures—cast doubts on truth and knowledge (which is, in their own way, a part of the knowledge these texts impart). As McClatchey writes in “Wringing Lilies from the Acorn,” “Books are packed/ with autumn answers, crispy, rotten things.” Meanwhile, in a poem like “Adam’s Task,” the ineffable truths contained in the natural world are celebrated: “Before he named the world, Adam heard/ the whorled language of fern.” That is, the natural world communicated purely until Adam named it, cementing it in language. As stated more directly at the end of the poem, “He owned it now. The songs/ of birds were passionless. Cold quiet soaked/ the woods. He begged the trees. Now nothing spoke.” By putting the natural world into language, so the collection argues, we put it into the same realm as the classical texts that we return to—and thereby they require more skepticism, a separation between the natural truth and its written facsimile.
Herein lies, too, a way that McClatchey successfully avoids one of the risks of working with classical materials. A classical approach can risk a sort of faulty conservatism or attempt to fabricate an idealized past that opposes—rather than speaks to or illuminates—the present. Killing Orpheus remains skeptical and analytic, intently treating the classics in their own terms. In navigating this problem, however, the collection then lands in a different problem. There are brief moments where the collection’s honest, clear-eyed depiction of the classics overlooks the intermediary past, how certain connotations have changed or been recontextualized, introducing dissonance between the classical allusion and the contemporary issues the poem is attempting to comment on.
This is most apparent in the handling of two slavery metaphors in the poems “Ringneck” and “The Monster Captures Frankenstein,” which appear one after the other at the end of the collection’s second section. Considering the classical scope of the collection overall, these metaphors may be meant to call to mind antiquity’s slavery. In fact, there is a third mention of slavery that appears in the collection’s titular poem, though this mention is used literally and explicitly—we are reading about the slavery of the Roman Colosseum: “After archers shoot Diana’s dogs/ the slaves haul Actaeon’s remains away.” This explicit contextualization is required to make a contemporary American reader decouple a reference to slavery from American chattel slavery and the sociopolitical ramifications that so deeply inform our contemporary political climate. As the poems have invited us again and again to consider how these references relate to us now, we are especially primed to read the word slavery and think of our contemporary politics. Neither of the two poems seem interested in handling the question they introduce with this subject matter: what does the commentary in the poem have to do with the racial violence of slavery?
While it is hardly a requirement for every work of writing to engage every subject, these two metaphors are ruptures, moments that, through imprecise connotative work, speak to realms beyond the poems’ own. The scope and scale of slavery’s violence supersede the metaphors’ subjects of comparison, leaving them faulty. In “The Monster Captures Frankenstein,” the tercet reads “The moment you made me/ you became my slave. I hold you/ as the ocean holds a fish.” The fish simile is better suited; it does not introduce the same connotational problems and points to, with greater vividness and accuracy, the type of relationship and power dynamics the poem is actually interested in (conflict between creation and creator). These two moments stood out in my reading: in an otherwise deft handling, I was left wanting more awareness of how the contemporary speaks back to the classics.
I would be remiss in discussing Killing Orpheus without drawing attention to its formalism, its third major structural device as a collection and yet another way McClatchey effectively utilizes the classical scope. A majority of the poems in this collection are sonnets, full of wonderful moments of musicality and voltas that inject drama and surprise into the poems. One of poetry’s great pleasures, and perhaps underutilized in the contemporary poetry landscape, is the paradox of form and revelation. How formal constraint can open a piece and drive it into the unexpected. While I’m consistently engaged by the imagery, allusions, and analytical subjectivity on display in Killing Orpheus, the formal mastery magnifies these elements to give the poems their lasting effect.
Take, for instance, the triolet “Dragonflies Hunting,” a poem whose first refrain of “Delicate acts make durable news” invokes its durability through the formal repetition of the refrain. The triolet, a thirteenth century French form, contains only eight lines: two refrains (the first repeated three times, the second, two) and three other lines that rhyme with either the first or second refrain. Here we can see how the collection’s form and content increase the other’s impact. The poem is short, delicate in a sense (like a dragonfly’s wing); so much hangs in the balance of only a few intricately crafted lines. The poem is also durable, with a clear formal spine, and speaks to a core aspect of the survival of one of nature’s most efficient hunters, a behavioral inheritance crafted through millions of years of evolution. It is knowledge that has been passed down—not unlike the patterns of fixed forms used by generations of poets—its own kind of “durable news.”
Complicating this further is the B refrain, which is first introduced as “This dragonfly that bends the stem” but then, at the close of the poem, distorts in its echo: “And leave behind a shuddering stem.” This deviation wonderfully invokes the shuddering the poem itself speaks of—the form enacts its own shuddering (or even bending, as in the first version of the refrain). Here, too, the formal inheritance is pushed back on slightly; to say what the speaker needs to say, the form bends. There is a subtle playfulness here: the poem and its form have the exact mix of durability and delicateness to handle this bending.
I again return to those lines from the opening, “without ice/ and wind and punishment, it dies.” Through the diligent work required by formal constraint—rhyme and meter offering some combination of punishment and wind—we are delivered, again and again, pieces of hard-earned wisdom or emotional evocation. The greatest sense of consoling that these poems offer is often in their function as art; the poems are well-crafted, they are experiences that, like the trees in “Root Words” are constantly “uttering sugar language, a grammar thick/ as honey.”
It is ultimately this combination of formal excellence and rhetorical rigor that facilitates my full appreciation for the poetry in this collection. As I read, I’m wondering constantly about the relations between different elements of the poems. Classic forms and classic subjects. The beautiful and the deadly, or, perhaps more broadly even, life and death. The poems that deal with the classics are almost always bleak in argument—yet they have the scope and scale of epic and antiquity. They are full of drama, rich context, and, like all poems in Killing Orpheus, musically deft language. Likewise, we see how the natural world can contain both the harsh and the beautiful, and the poems help us to pull meaning out from the conflict or cohesion between the two.
Constructing harmonies or contrasts is also the approach the collection takes for its explorations of the domestic, quotidian aspects of human life. In the sonnet “Not Knowing How to Breathe,” for example, we are treated to a luxurious, sonorous music—an effusiveness in lines such as “To mark the purl/ of puff that gladdens orchards in the lungs.” The context of this poem, however, seems much more serious: the speaker’s daughter, either due to sickness or some other ailment, is learning to breathe: “Not knowing how to breathe is a song;/ soon you’ll know, and this balky song will die.” Note the language here: the inherent tension—the speaker, leaning into the beautiful music, draws attention to the song, how the sounds of the child’s inability to breathe are a beautiful song that will disappear when the child learns to breathe in a regular manner. This is an encounter with life and survival—the beauty of survival—yet it comes to the speaker through “a blend of sighs and snorts, of jagged whirrs/ and gurgle moans.” Either one of these elements on their own might be too simple, but put together, they become dynamic and complex, elevating the domestic space to the same level as the natural world or classical texts we have explored throughout.
In a poetry landscape utilizing popular culture and organic or experimental forms—the newest of new—to great effect, it is extremely welcome to also see a collection so thoroughly engaged with finding something equally new in the old, in showing us that the past is still as much of a frontier for poetry to explore as the present or future. And while not all classically-minded writers achieve this balance, McClatchey is, and he does so to tremendous effect throughout Killing Orpheus. His debut comes as a standout collection among that subsect of poets working in this mode. For the reader willing to deeply engage and re-engage with these excellent poems, Forester McClatchey’s debut Killing Orpheus is endlessly rewarding. They are sure to come away with new insight and perspective on our current moment—and may even be consoled by what they find here, too.