Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones gathers a cross-section of old and new poems by Lucia Perillo (On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths). Drawn from her six previous collections written over 30 years, it underscores the eclectic range, wit and sensibility of this fine poet who, surprisingly, came to poetry after an early career in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
A current of darkness and decay flows within several poems, such as "White Bird/Black Drop," where she juxtaposes a botulism epidemic among California snowy egrets with the opium-addicted life of Samuel Coleridge "wandering/ the upland stoned out of his head" and a leather-jacketed bus rider "dozing, hunched into his collar... hunched into his wrecked good looks." But Perillo also joyfully embraces the chaos of life--like her father's advice for snow driving: "when everything goes to hell the worst you can do/ is hit the brakes," or the instinct-driven salmon swimming upstream to spawn: "They get their discipline from the current/ and go crazy in the calm." In "Twenty-Five Thousand Volts per Inch," she even takes a poke at herself in wilder days: "And we could not bear to miss the jam band from our youth,/ which we feared discovering lacked talent and looked foolish/ in their caveman belt buckles and leather hats."
It's good to see Perillo's sweeping talent displayed in one diverse and rewarding collection. As she notices in a poem with the book's eponymous title, "the bones may have the beauty but the meat/ the better story." Her work has plenty of bones--but even more meat. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.