Creature by Kathryn Kirkpatrick
Creature
by Kathryn Kirkpatrick
Jacar Press, 2025
reviewed by Bethany Reid
I agreed to review this book several months ago. Before I got to it, life stepped in and, from March through August, I dealt with an illness in my immediate family. So that’s me. Not an excuse for a tardy review, mind you, but an explanation. Meanwhile, in the notebook labeled “projects,” there sat this manuscript and the commitment I had made months back to review it. How lucky then, to pick up Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s Creature, and discover a paean to loss, and—at the same time—a call to keep faith with whatever comes.
Creature is an apt title. Rescue dogs, pandemic puppies, cows, owls, hawks, humans—all get lumped into the mix, brutalized by life, fussed over, lamented. An early poem, “Visitation,” is dream-like (a ride in a car with both a dead mother and a crow), and in it we watch and are watched over. These lines leapt off the page:
when the crow dreams
what need has she of me?
With her wing of blue black,
Her sharp eye of dark,
she follows rhythms we do not see
but might, with us as the air is with us,
as I am with my mother, guiding who
guided me, feathers of memory,
words in the blue black, so that
I am homed and homing…
The poem ends, “love with its earthbound claw, / need with its open wings.”
Poems about birds getting into houses, about cows separated from weaned calves, poems about wrens nesting in garden gloves, a silk moth (“her flight / named for her death / bombyx mori”), poems about family ties, about polio vaccines, about a father in uniform, and later a father in his grave while a mother and daughter grope toward life without, poems about face-masks and lockdown, poems about old dogs. Was it the scratched lens I read through, or is all of life so heartbreakingly tender, and so worth tending?
The poems about dogs come toward the end of the book, and—full disclosure, having lost my emotional support animal last October (just when I was ramping up to need him most)—they are my favorites. Look at the words and images in these opening lines from “Early Light,”: “and his bark is crescendo and flourish, / a running up and down the scales.” In another poem in this section, “Landfill,” even death gets its due, even abuse, all “received with reverence,” surviving as bones and dust, and “a boy’s love.” It might be a coda for what the book, over all, achieves.
That some of the poems are in forms—pantoum and villanelle, nonce forms, too—and many play deftly with rhyme lightens and makes palatable these heavy subjects. “Waiting with Ceilidh” repeats the word “wait” (good word for a dog poem, as if the poem was rehearsed with Ceilidh before being unleashed on us). In fourteen (or so) irregular lines, “wait” or a form of wait is used seven times. A living dog pines for a buried dog, while the natural world holds all of them, living and dead, “the hill’s / soft brow longer than there is light.”
Kirkpatrick is an accomplished poet with several book prizes, including the 2019 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems. She teaches environmental literature, animal studies, and Irish studies from an ecofeminist perspective at Appalachian State University. In her acknowledgments she thanks, among others, Irish poet Paula Meehan, one of my favorite poets, too. Lest I have overworked the tenderness angle in this review (something I am susceptible to just now), let me leave you with these lines from “On House and Senate Resolution 69,” which is about killing wolf cubs:
I do not
wish to be done with kindness
but if a poem has power, casts a spell,
let this one put a fang in your heart.
The poems in Creature definitely cast a spell on me.
Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018). Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .
Reviews/Interviews at Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s website
Kathryn Kirkpatrick for Climate Stories NC at her North Carolina home on YouTube
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