“When things go one way and not the other” in The Dream of Reason by Jenny George (Copper Canyon Press, 2018)

By Maureen Alsop

Jenny George, in her debut collection, The Dream of Reason, offers courage in her capacity to chaperone the reader through the inner and outer savageries inherent in a human geography. Her poems solvently diagram the animal inside us, outside of us, as us. In her narrative, George explores a realm where “Something flightless is cramped in its heart.” We enter a space of entrail without the word for entrail. We enter a plane of inert awareness where consciousness is no longer measured, no longer separate, and no longer empathetic. George exposes the internal realm of death’s external reality: “Winter: the buried forms.”

She writes:
“Take a newborn calf and wind it

In a piece of cloth, it is no different
From any organ lifted out of a body—“

Irreplaceable replication. In a subtle challenge to classic pastorals, which explore an enriched bucolic, George’s pastorals dissect the relationship between man and animal (primarily domestic) with the eye of a scientist. The poems provide a commentary without pity nor surprise. As in the poem “Revelation”:

When the brainstem of a frog
is expertly snipped, the body sac slit,
skin pinned back in flaps and then
the jellies of the chest arranged
to reveal the heart, the heart itself
can be unfastened, clipped, lifted
like a gray pearl on the tip of a knife,
still trembling, ...”

Is this a respectable form of violence, the tremble and terror? As when an image of slaughter is elevated to a form of an act. In the poem “Vaudeville,” George writes:

The pigs hang in rows like pink overcoats.
Their slaughter is fresh, a rosy blush —
as if chorus girls have only just
stepped out of them,
leaving the empty garments
swaying on their hooks.

Is this a sadist’s perception of beauty and humor? Or a satire on man’s obliviousness? Or is the poem a metaphor on subjugation—of women, of animal, on what is “normal,” on what entertains? Or does the poem elude to the underlying human acceptance of the gruesome as a laudable grotesque?

Without inhibition, George embraces her observations of cruelty in a clinical form:

“In the sweat of the barn
I watched him shoot the calf in the head.
He wipes the hide gently, like cleaning his glasses... 

…It never gets easier
he said,
kicking straw over the blood patch.
She went down so quiet it was almost
sad.”

George underscores the complexity of complicity which overrides moments when the quickened heart is exposed and directionless. The poems echo a sense of ‘purpose lost’ in this clarity as the observer/participant succumbs to a sense the continuity, bound by action.

“The herd faced forward as the herd always does...

…It could have been any gate, any moment when things go
one way and not the other—an act of tenderness
or a small, cruel thing done with a pocketknife.”

This switching, this tilting toward the central point, this form of acceptance in itself becomes purpose.

We have all witnessed them: the cows, pigs, chickens held captor a migration of highway trucks, pink bodies hung in the back-room racks of the grocer before finding the limp cellophane’s wink in neon lit frozen food aisles. She reminds us: “…cattle have been carried away in trucks.” In the repetitions the image recurs“ The pigs are prodded through a passage./ The pigs are loaded onto trucks.” Are these nonchalant observations? Or is insight a formality of betrayal? Is anguish impartial? Is “premature” in a premature death a misinterpretation of inevitability, a servitude, a or limitless function of something beyond?

The title poem finishes with a beaten horse where “flies /crawled excited on the beat marks. ...” Here, pain is an innocuous understory, a metaphor of how we hurt and succumb to brutality. We, an omnipresence, a stitchery like parasitic flies. A politic and a puppet. The speaker in the poem exchanges a tentative consciousness with the horse under a malevolent vibration

“He was aware of me, but he did not turn—
... He listened
through many ears of grasses.
A jay made a hole in the air with its cry…

Everywhere, invisible as heat, the gods
married each other and went to war. ...
As if we both were standing still
inside some greater, more violent motion.”

The listening grasses. The lost lyric of Whitmanesque “spear[s] of summer grass.” The world itself is a massing myopic, our mixed cells splatted upon a microscope slide. What we cannot see we are seen by. What we are aware of we heave within.

The violence depicted, sometimes impassively and graphically, in The Dream of Reason are not a source of pleasant refuge or escape. Rather, the poems are haunted by the human pressuring of animal brutality.