The Orchard, Brigit Pegeen Kelly (BOA Editions Ltd. 2004)
In my early twenties I met with a Sikh mystic for a past life reading. After engaging me in conversation for a moment and staring intently into my face, he proclaimed me to have been a Japanese man in my last life. I was convinced he was right considering my obsession with Japanese literature, fairytales, and film. Let us now fast forward an unmentionable amount of years to the present where I make use of four sublime hours during the week as a volunteer wildlife rehabber (tenderly nursing a fox bite as I type this column). My love of the natural world and all creatures within, and of Asian myths and tales, brings to you my latest verse and picture show recommendation. This one, dear readers, is a feast for the all of the senses, two big beautiful collections of poems. One printed onto the paged pulpy ghosts of trees and another rolled into the filmstrips of one of the greatest directors of our time. Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s latest collection, The Orchard, creates a distant landscape of mythic creatures, lush and radiant language, and a strange and terrible beauty that will cuddle close to your psyche, revealing itself for years to come. Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams joins Kelly’s work in taking you deep down into the bones of legends, humanity’s love and destruction of the natural world, meditations on darkness and regret, death, and despair, ending with a twitch of salvation.
Akira Kurosawa’s legendary oeuvre spans decades, but it is this film that he declares his most personal. Dreams consists of eight fragmentary vignettes, each with the ability to stand alone but when sewn together create a mesmerizing journey into the strange and breathtaking world of the central “I” character that appears in each section. The film opens with the beautiful and bewitching story, “Sunshine Through The Rain,” in which the “I” as a young boy is told not to go into the forest on a day when it is raining but the sun continues to shine brilliantly down into a massive forest. It is on days like this, his mother says, that foxes hold their wedding ceremonies. The boy disobeys his mother, disturbs an ethereally beautiful fox wedding and must deal with the consequences. This vignette contains some of the most exquisite cinematography that has ever been put to screen. Another equally stunning short entitled “The Peach Orchard” makes use of the Hina Matsuri (or Doll Festival) celebration in Japan. This festival occurs in spring amid the peach blossoms and the dolls that are put on display during the festivities are said to embody the spirits of the peach trees and their fleshy blossoms. The same “I” character, still a young boy, finds the trees’ spirits have awakened the dolls and they are furious that the peach trees have been cut down in the boy’s family orchard. The boy explains through his tears that he loved the peach trees and still mourns their absence, thus endearing himself to the spirits and convincing them to perform an elegant dance to conjure one last vision of the peach trees heavy with spring blooms. “The Blizzard” is one of three nightmares contained in the film. Four lost mountaineers struggle through freezing temperatures and a giant snowstorm in search of their camp in this wickedly meditative tale. As each mountaineer yields to the snow, the last one is visited by a beautiful female snow demon (or Yuki-onna in Japanese mythology) who winds her long black hair and blue shawl of snow and stars around him, cooing in a guttural raspy purr,” The snow is warm. The ice is hot.” enticing him to succumb to the endless sleep of death. Each of these eight magical stories intertwines Japanese mythology, visual delights, and most importantly, the Japanese tradition of Noh theatre to create a world of cautionary and resplendent fables.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s masterful collection, The Orchard is, in my opinion, one of the most gorgeous books of poetry ever written. Kelly’s work defies current poetry trends and takes us on a journey through old growth forests full of rotting flowers, muddied algae filled ponds ripe with the hot sweet smell of swan feathers, aged statues with limbs hacked through and dying and decayed animals whose flesh scream the secrets of nature. She is a modern mythmaker, yet her work seems centuries old, wisping together created fables, allegories and imagery, Kelly leads us into a world beyond the hollow, tired beauty and sadness of this life. She takes us into a haunted orchard as thick as an ancient forest; a place where loss and guilt can overturn stones and cause diseased dogs to bring a man’s decapitated head up from their throats. In her striking poem, “The Dragon” Kelly describes the sight of two swarms of bees guiding the body of a snake through the stale air of a garden.
“A snake hung between them. The bees held up a snake,
Lifting each side of his narrow neck, just below
The pointed head, and in this way, very slowly
They carried the snake through the garden,
The snake’s long body hanging down, its tail dragging
The ground, as if the creature were a criminal
Being escorted to execution or a child king
To the throne. I kept thinking the snake
Might be a hose, held by two ghostly hands,
But the snake was a snake, his body green as the grass
His tail divided, his skin oiled, the way a male member
Is oiled by the female’s juices, the greenness overbright,
The bees gold, the winged serpent moving silently
Through the air. There was something deadly in it,
Or already dead…”
Kelly’s world, along with Kurosawa’s, allows us to trudge through an unspeakable darkness and illuminate it with wisdom and beauty. They excavate the holy ground of the subconscious mind and the unspeakable cruelty of nature and humankind. These two meditations cloaked in film and text call upon the blackened shards of memory from childhood, the sense of dread as your foot sinks into the loamy undergrowth of the darker parts of the forest or the catch in your breath as you hear the banshee scream of a vixen fox in the wee hours of the morning. The last poem of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s collection, “The Sparrow’s Gate” ends our nightmarish journey through these whispers of spirits and sorrow with a small spark of clarity and light.
“and the mind clears—mayflies, the last fruits of the season,
…..trembling in the air above, like the air itself made visible—
and something comes through the gates….what?….what is it?….Oh,
…..yes, it is a woman
no, it is two women.
and they are laughing and laughing, and carrying on.”
