To Wildness
Winner of the 19th Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
Selected by Paul Muldoon
Waywiser Press, 2025
$18.00, 88 pages ISBN: 978–1–911379–16–4
It is not possible to tame the wildness of Julia Thacker’s latest collection To Wildness. In it, she defies in most triumphant and instantly engaging ways, the conventions of restraint that limit voice, tone, range of reverences, not to mention the contents of the poems in a book. And, in particular, that eschew reference to biography, self and family. Winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, the book is prefaced by the judge, Paul Muldoon. His introduction alludes to its deep kinship with Robert Lowells’ Life Studies, not only in the various levels of diction, but even in the content of the four sections of both works, and of course, the notion that the poems are indeed life studies. But Muldoon’s insightful and astute preface does little to prepare us for the carnival frenzy of variety that comes.
What’s astonishing is Thacker’s skill in juggling what might seem disparate elements with the ease of a circus performer managing an armful of plates that end up stacked one atop the other as if inevitably. In the first poem we are treated to Thacker’s prestidigitation from the first strong line:
I alone refused to be baptized.
thus she announces at least a sense of the milieu in which she was raised, and her defiant rejection of (some) of it. It’s a strong personal sounding revelation. She continues:
My cousins thought I was going to hell
but I only moved to Massachusetts
her humor and her humoring already showing,
where snows are Biblical
and thinking is the local prayer.
She completes the first stanza of the first poem both mocking and aligning herself with the values of her past and present.
And that is only the start of the vertiginous experience of the first poem in the book. We move from the clever declarative language of the opening to a rollicking rendition of evenings at the local Cambridge, Mass. pub, the Plough and Stars where “one swig” sends her “wrapped in blackberry/ bramble, the singing and stomping”... back to somewhere like the Harlan County, Kentucky of her grandfather.
The final lines of the first poem state the case of the book,
I’m all mixed up
like that.
And just like that she treats us to a wonderfully inventive number of ways to characterize that mix. There are surprising list poems like “Curriculum Vitae” :
...I My Sin, I Shalimar, I gold/ clasp. I assemblage. I mess with the past...
a delightful fusion of surprising nouns turned verb, and then the declaration:
My kin picnic in cemeteries so no one gets left out.
(In a way, the whole book can be seen as a picnic in a cemetery to which every ghostly vivid character, familial and encountered, is welcome and necessary.)
There are poems like “Author’s Note” which opens with a catchy flounce:
Raised in the hollows, I write under the pen name Mae on the Morrow.
and continues with a claim that rings more true to the book than “Mae” might know:
I have worked as a ventriloquist for the dead.
In section two, “notes towards an elegy,” Thacker does something like that, speaking apparently from her own younger self about her mother. One poem is entitled “(She blotted lipstick on our report cards, the backs of light bulbs.)”
As always, the precise, telling details are Thacker’s forte. She evokes whole worlds with the dexterity of the accomplished fiction writer that she is.
Her poetry sparkles with visual juxtapositions that enable her to communicate whole narratives through the innuendos of imagery. “All the Flowers Are for Me” begins:
By the fistful, licorice-black, Georgia clay-red,
cheddar-yellow pills, pressed into my palm.
These are not the shades of an Ophelia, floating covered in blossoms, nor even the fushia and white blossoms of The Empress pictured on the cover (from Kahn and Selesnick’s Tower of the Drowning World), but earthy, familiar and domestic as cheese. The poem enacts) with language that evokes succinctly, from the long drawn-out wide sounds:
...I spread my bramble of hair
to the tight “i’s” and “s’s” of
....iron hissing, singed....
the delirium of diet pills.
In section three, almost every poem opens with an unexpected and compelling line. One is drawn to each new scene enticingly presented. Here are three:
My brother is stoned, his pupils black marbles
“Black Hole”
Her blue dress with yellow cornflowers
“Conjoined Twins Plead, “Put us Back Together”
Brothers Unhapphy Since They Were Separated 45 Years Ago”
Dress fully in your shoes of paper
“How to Get Released from the Hospital”
There is an alluring tension between the enticement of each poem’s particular situation and the droning undertow of death. In Dear Earth, the poet introduces the father whose “thoughts are as blank as a deserted barn.” “Dear Earth”, she writes, “Please admit my father.” And there are other poignant but also wise and humorous poems about the father, messages from the deceased mother, vocalizings by a great great grandfather.
This book looks small, contained, but it is rambunctious, full of wild life fully lived and startlingly engaging.