In The Wild Delight of Wild Things, the beautifully melancholic third poetry collection from Brian Turner (Phantom Noise), environmental crisis puts personal bereavement into perspective. "And this is what I didn't expect. That the world would help me to survive," Turner writes about the death in 2016 of his wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz. The collection abounds with imagery from the natural world and appreciation for medical technology. "This wild family of ours" includes humans within nature. Coastal scenery captures the imagination in "Seagulls in California" and "Cephalopods." "Heroes" marvels at bacteria that decompose plastic, likening them to the chemotherapy agents administered to combat Ilyse's cancer.
An elegiac tone infuses the poems about animals. There is an affecting piece on the suffering of beached whales; the list of endangered species in "The Jurassic Coast" is "a kind of roll call of the dead/ and dying." Yet Turner acknowledges that the end of one human life can feel just as momentous as the extinction of an entire species. One year before Ilyse died, he lost his father, Marshall, who had been stationed on an idyllic--but radioactive--Pacific atoll. The magnitude of space and geological time contrasts with the small and individual through a depiction of ant cities and a housefly's view on life. There is a focus, too, on the elemental: the wildfires of California and the ice of cryogenic freezing. Jellyfish, spiral shells, caves, and redwood forests: Turner spins infectious awe for how an imperiled world of wonders can console the grieving. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck