Underground River Poems by Peggy Shumaker

The most important issue in Underground River Poems is the interplay between life and death, particularly where these things are located. Frequently in the book death is found in things that are alive, sometimes even physically, as in “Snowflake Eel” - “With a pitbull’s frenzy, / the eel shakes the bones / so hard the luckless spine / lashes like a knotted whip.” Likewise, life is often found in things that are dead as in “Green Sea Turtles,” – “parrotfishes’ sharp beaks / chip off coral into their mouths / What their bodies can’t use / builds the beach.” And sometimes the two are twisted into each other, alternating, as in “Owl’s Cough Balls,” in which we see the image of eating, followed by the regurgitation of undigested body parts, which are then described as “lush left over.” This, contrasted with the earlier lines “petals on the prickly pear / samba their brief lives in splendor / then make way for ripe fruit” suggests a cycle of life and death, which is the larger point. It is also important to note that in the poem in which life and death alternate multiple times (as opposed to others that feature one inside the other), “Owl’s nest,” the poet has one of her only “ars poetical” moments. Of the boney, furry remains of the digested rodent she says, “matter / immobile but filled / with stories.” We should also note the recurrent theme of the arroyo which connotes a dry riverbed, a dead thing, that used to be alive, that may or may not be filled again. Shumaker presents the arroyo by putting it in the mind of the narrator in the first section of the book, a young girl, through the image of thirst. This, again, puts one inside the other: a young girl (life) standing in a dried up river (death) who, despite her thirst (death) focuses mostly on the future (life/hope), which Shumaker shows us through dreams.

This theme is also supported by sexual images and scenes. We can see this in “Orange Peel.” “She slides one male peel / into the female hollow of another. / Cringes. They laugh.” When this is put next to the later lines “The going, the coming / the aurora, the lifeline / the flowering from within / the ‘In the meantime, what?” we see playful sexual suggestion paired with real life. More importantly, we see that this life comes from the moments in which one makes playful sexual jokes. This is a theme much like the aforementioned theme of life in death – life from small moments. For another example, consider “Rime,” which comes directly after “Orange Peel,” a poem that depicts what happens inside the clitoris: “the little stone / overlooked, often / plain little stone / where vibrations of each life ever lived.” Shumaker supports the theme of interconnectedness and life inside other things by transforming her sexual experience into natural imagery; and by making the origin of an orgasm the place “where vibrations of each life ever lived,” she connects the physical act sex and its occasional anatomical consequences with a deep, natural spirituality.

The book is broken into sections. I was most interested in “Camoflage,” because it reads like a slideshow or photo album. It seems to be just a collection of memories that for the most part speak for themselves. The message is not in the actual words in this section, but rather in the manifest relationships between the poems that bloom as more poems are read, as if the reader is getting an increasingly clearer picture of the past by gaining access to more memories, one by one. “Crossing the Pacific” reflects this structure. This somewhat different from other contemporary writers, who often find themselves fighting for a turn, for a “something to say.” In this section, Shumaker uses technique and poem organization to create meta-poetic meaning.