The True Account of Myself as a Bird by Robert Wrigley (review)

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• The True Account of Myself as a Bird by Robert Wrigley
• Ronald McFarland

Robert Wrigley, The True Account of Myself as a Bird. New York: Penguin, 2022. 92 pp. Paper, $18.

Perhaps having read and reflected briefly on the twenty-two quatrains of "Visitant," wherein the poet pisses in the snow, you found it fun but self-indulgent. But maybe, after another glass of wine or beer followed by another reading, you discovered more than you suspected. Spoiler alert: The "visitant" in the poem, "whatever it is"—possum?—does not emanate from the spirit world. Wrigley doesn't identify the creature beyond its "ten-by-sixteen-inch rectangular" size and its "gleaming black eyes," but he plays the cordial host, and in the process, he reveals something of his character, both the man he is and the persona who inhabits most of his poems, who appear to be the same guy.

But turn to the penultimate poem, "She Said," of this, Wrigley's thirteenth collection, ninety-four lines in stanzas of variable lengths that reflect on the assassination of President Kennedy. Among hundreds of elegies and eulogies for JFK, "She Said," encountered nearly sixty years after that tragedy, must strike readers as anything but a jeu d'esprit. Yet, "She Said," which focuses on words uttered by Jackie Kennedy that fateful day—"Oh Jack, what have they done?"—arises from the same poetics we encounter in "Visitant": The apotheosis of the quotidian, a celebration of the ordinary.

"She Said" opens with Wrigley's memory of diagramming sentences, "one of the few things" he was "good at in school," and somehow that makes the poem more poignant than it would be had he launched directly into the shocking announcement over the school's intercom. The Secret Service agent, Wrigley notes, "has remembered [End Page 296] what she said all his life since," and he writes that watching the funeral on TV he witnessed his father weep "for the only time in my life." After that, he briefly describes the funeral, mentioning Jackie's lost "pink pillbox hat" and the "strawberry pink, wool bouclé, double-breasted / Chanel suit" she wore the day of the assassination, "stiffened with her husband's blood."

The poem then shifts to the twelve-year-old poet walking coatless in the cold November air, not wanting to watch his father cry, before returning to the scene of the shooting, the lost hat, the agent recalling Jackie's words remembered sixteen years later, followed unexpectedly by the mundane grammatical observation that those words constituted a "rhetorical question," and at age twelve he had no idea what that meant. Then Wrigley diagrams the sentence, noting with a grammarian's aesthetic distance that the "third person plural pronoun" they "refers to a group not specifically identified" and the "relative pronoun" what "also refers to something unstated,

unless it is blood and bone, her husband's exploded head in her lap,nothing more, and no one else.

Poets often remind us that momentous, even tragic, events occur in the most ordinary contexts. W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" celebrates just such a mythic event, and his elegy, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," reminds readers that when Yeats died stockbrokers were "roaring like beasts" on the floors of the exchange and the suffering poor were "fairly accustomed" to their quotidian miseries. "Poetry makes nothing happen," Auden declares midway through the poem, but it "survives" as "a way of happening, a mouth," a voice.

One cannot properly describe a collection of fifty-six poems by reference to its two longest and perhaps most complex efforts. Wrigley concludes his book with the eleven tercets of "Chorus," which reflects a more playful aspect of his vision: the poet interacting with wildlife, fully aware of the otherness as he confronts the distance between them. While he strums the 1964 Beatles hit, "She Loves You," for a doe he believes is pregnant, he wants her to "appreciate" not only "the miraculous fact of human music but also of me." He sees the deer's face as "intense' and "pure" in its "regard," [End Page 297] and he keeps strumming and singing, as...