I spent the last month of 2020 with a particular word rattling around my head which, for once, wasn’t ‘unprecedented’. The word in question? ‘Mouthmouth’.
This bilabial wonder originates in Cheryl Pearson‘s Menagerie, in the poem ‘Hedgehog’, as the prickly anthropomorphic speaker declares itself to be ‘[a]ll mouthmouth’. It was quite possibly the best word I read all year. I’ve certainly never read one aloud that made me embody a hedgehog smacking hungry lips before.
My particular obsession with ‘mouthmouth’ aside, Pearson’s Menagerie is full of captivating poems that linger on the often confusing line between ‘beauty and catastrophe’ (as one speaker puts it). Such a line is prevalent in the wildernesses Pearson’s animals inhabit. The collection is split into three sections, ‘WATER’, ‘EARTH’, and ‘AIR’, with six poems in each about animals that thrive in that element, ranging from an octopus to a lion, a kingfisher to a great white shark.
The collection opens in water with ‘Consider the Seahorse’, an ode to a seahorse’s life in the vastness of the ocean, a world with ‘no corners’. The sense of scale in this poem is enchanting, as Pearson contrasts the seahorse watching ‘great whites cruise like missiles’ above, with his intimate knowledge of ‘the mussel and its labial folds, the jellyfish hauling its light’. While there is a sense of threat, of sharing a home with a multitude of creatures, friend and foe alike, there is also a great feeling of freedom for the horse that has ‘[n]o bits or blinkers. No harnesses. No gates.’ There is love in the ‘tinselled strings of air’ he blows out, in the way he ‘bends sweetly to his mate.’ Pearson lets us in on the quiet joy of such a life, one that can be found even in the harshest of environments.
The poems often meditate on the relationship between humans and animals, recognising that we are one and the same. Perhaps my favourite instance of this occurs in ‘Great White’. The speaker is out shark-watching, looking into the ‘dead eyes’ of the great whites as they ‘breach’ and ‘shiver’. ‘[W]e are also animals. Despite our spiderplants and Instagram accounts. Our credit cards and watering cans’, they say; ‘[y]es we’d be swallowed like communion wafers. But I would sink a mallet into a thousand skulls to feed my daughter.’ Animals provide an often forgotten mirror to ourselves in Pearson’s work, an acknowledgement of the survival instincts and the potential for violence born of love and necessity that lies within us all. After all, ‘[h]unger’s hunger’.
We slip swiftly from water to earth with ‘Gold In The Lion’, a poem inspired by the injection of gold into Bellamy, an arthritic Asian Lion, by veterinarians in Rome in 2005. The relationship between animals and humans takes on a new form here, one of care, science, and artistry. Pearson likens the procedure to the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken pots are repaired with gold or silver lacquer, considered all the more beautiful for having been broken. The speaker notes that the procedure feels like Bellamy is being topped up with ‘the smelted metals he’s made of…[l]ike his blood has always been crown-coloured, shining’. There is beauty in human intervention, in repair. Recognition of a life in need, restored with kindness and generosity, so that we might once again marvel, so that the lion might once again be marvellous. The more I think about this poem, the more I love it.
There is beauty in smaller creatures too. ‘Blue Mole’ conveys the birth and life of a mole up until his first ‘breach’ into the world, breaking up through the dirt where a star settles upon his nose. ‘Hedgehog’ brings us the joy of ‘mouthmouth’, lingering in a hedgehog’s hungry thoughts, the terror of dusk, the smell of ‘[f]ox-piss’ and the roll to safety, to secrecy, to ‘[h]ide the tender.’
There is also the horror of ‘Hardangervidda’, which recounts the death of over three hundred reindeer killed by a single lightning strike in the Norwegian mountains in 2016,* the ‘pop and…spit as their fat cooked where they stood.’ Pearson’s notes explain that reindeer group together when spooked, and that the proximity of their bodies allowed the lightning to travel unobstructed through the herd. Yet, Pearson finds wonder here too, in the return of particles ‘perhaps…from the same original star’ to itself, like ‘two old lovers meeting – Here you are. After all these years.’
Air of course brings with it the avian, from a magpie ‘dapper as Capone’ to a peacock full of summer’s colours: ‘blue sky, green grass, gold flower to butter a throat’. My favourite in this section is ‘Fledgling’, in which the speaker finds a dead bird ’empty of life on the path’, its eyes the ‘plum-blue of bruises’. She notes that its wings are ‘buds’, and reflects that this is how she ‘knew [her] breasts, at first’; how she ‘knew [her] shape would bend and swell like riverwater’. The speaker wonders at how the bird ‘speak[s] to [her] of a blue dress, [her] first kiss?’; the ‘first time [she] fell, yes; the first time [she] flew.’ The ability death has to make us acutely aware of our aliveness, our litheness, our shape that shifts as opposed to that which is stiff, is something I found particularly captivating in ‘Fledgling’. There is also perhaps a feeling of luckiness too; if we live long enough we will have many firsts, be a fledgling over and over. It’s a simple but powerful revelation.
Ultimately, Menagerie asks us to look for the beauty in catastrophe, the divine in the animal, and the animal in ourselves. It is published by The Emma Press, an independent press whose work I love (this is the second book published by them that I’ve reviewed, see my review of Kathy Pimlott’s Goose Fair Night here). So many of their books feel like artefacts, and Menagerie is no exception, featuring fantastic illustrations by Amy Evans. I highly recommend that you check out Menagerie, and The Emma Press.
Until next time,
Lizzie
*Please note that the article on the reindeer deaths at Hardangervidda features images of the deceased reindeer. If this will upset you, please do avoid it.
THE THING WITH FEATHERS 
