Grounded in rural Montana and Wyoming, B.J. Buckley’s collection In January, the Geese (Comstock Review, 2022) shares a world unfamiliar to many, through poems that resonate across place and time. Her language, like the land and its flora, fauna, and people, is at once muscular and tender. She spares nothing in graphic detail of life and death on the farms, ranches, and wild lands where weather is fierce and capricious, life is tenuous, and change ever at hand. “Upthrust,” the collection’s opening poem, introduces these themes.
Frost heaves itself from the ground: everything
buried begins its slow swim to the surface….
……Deep in the coulees
where the dead have long buried the dead—
mare with her colt caught breech half born,
gutshot deer, lost lamb—the soft earth
that swallowed them opens its mouth,
spits back their bones like pearls.
The transformation occurs literally, physically, yet as in all these poems, something deeper is at play. Never sentimental, yet brimming with feeling and insight, Buckley’s poems feature sound, rhythm, and word choices that illuminate the beauty and character of the places and beings she writes about. In “At Sun River,” we meet:
….two old men cleaning their catch
…barehanded, slipping trout one by one
from the stringer, their knives quick and sure
as they slit shining bellies from anus to jaw
and thumb out the guts back into the water,
the gills bright red, quick rinse of pale flesh
in the silver current…
These poems address the changing climate through the lens of survival, relaying the world as the speakers and narrators experience it. In a gorgeous three-part poem, “Almost July,” we see:
Every leaf still. Wet snake hiss of pivots
flinging water over fields of barley, over
rapeseed and lentils and dill and peppermint,
dizzying perfumes. It smells like the rain
that will never fall again, like creeks empty
by August, like the too early blackening frost.
In the title poem, “In January, the Geese,” after observing the effects of changing weather patterns on geese and other living things, the speaker muses:
….I wish
I could trust this disastrous shift
of temperature, make peace with it
as the geese have done, so many of them
already gathering choicest sticks for nests.
The humans in these poems are hardened by their surroundings. Men with names like Clay, Darl, and Curly herd cattle and rescue pronghorn. They fish, lamb, mourn, and bury their dead. They are men of few words, who can’t afford expressing too much feeling, as portrayed in “C-Store, 5 a.m.”
…stolid, taciturn square-built men
in grain-store gimme caps [who] hold foam cups of scalding
coffee in their blunt-fingered hands, the blackened nails
and missing digits eloquent of the difficulty of the work,
of its cost…
Buckley’s poems illuminate the thin line between life and death that is faced daily in this rural environment. “Burn Pile” captures this, and since its closing insight applies to all of us, transcending time, and location, it seems a fitting place to end my review of this worthwhile, prize-winning collection.
Rumble of propane weed burner
at the base, a first crackle,
like hard frost breaking,
and all at once the fire is a bright dress,
an unbearable heat,
dragon roar out of heartwood
consuming the bones of summer
until they are ember, soot, ash
falling down around us all,
pale as snow, dust that we are,
marking us as its own.
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B.J. Buckley is a Montana writer who has worked in Arts in Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her previous books include Moon Horses and the Red Bull with co-author, Dawn Senior-Trask, Pronghorn Press 2005, and Corvidae, Poems of Ravens, Crows and Magpies, Lummox Press, 2014.
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Mary Beth Hines is a Lightwood writer and reviewer. She writes poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction from her home in Massachusetts. Recent work appears in Bracken, Cider Press Review, Tar River, and Valparaiso. Kelsay Books published her first poetry collection, “Winter at a Summer House,” in 2021. Connect with her at www.marybethhines.com.
(Read her Lightwood reviews and poems by clicking on the Lightwood search button.)
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