My frame for Kylan Rice’s poetry will always be the piece I read in Colorado Review last year. “Shield or Bee” is this remarkable exercise in density and the sound of density and the sound when making sense amidst a dense phrasing. Like what I could imagine a bee doing. But the poem isn’t “in the voice of a bee” or even speculating about a bee doing all its bee-ness. Rice’s poem, “Shield or Bee,” is personal, perhaps about his life, negotiating the complexities of life, thinking through ideas like “coherence needs a seed” or “marriage is a sudden hardening.” And what surprises me in “Shield or Bee” is how easily I can see the bee qualities that would have prompted the bee to appear in the title.
What, then, does the title of “Feldhase” (published in Mercury Firs 4) mean? And how would it relate to this personal reckoning of the poet? It’s not as easily negotiated. Because, according to my best Googling, the title is a German word for “European hare,” or a very large rabbit. And with the poem opening onto a field, my first instinct is to the poem served up from the animal’s viewpoint. Or at the very least a poem that views the world from the limited perspective an animal would carry. I don’t think the poem has this intention, though, given the immediate complications it lights on. Like, yes, the poem opens on the physical setting where I could imagine a hare appearing, but I don’t think that animal would shift to a discussion on the “many English words for dense light / structures.” Rice’s poem is positioned around a poet who’s occupied a field, wondering how he might describe it. And perhaps the role of the hare is to account for a kind of perspective. What would it mean for an animal to occupy this field, and how would a poem account for it. However thoughtful and sophisticated these “many English words” might make the poet, he is still beholden to the same physical surroundings a hare would perceive, like the gunshots he can hear at a distance, or the angular fence he sees.
Maybe a hare’s perception correlates to the “patience and careful / selection” a poet feels in these environs. Though “patience” would be a mere fiction a person projects onto a hare. Which is an understandable mistake. Because there is something entirely absorptive in an animal occupying land. Larry Levis called it “gazing” in his essays from The Gazer Within. Robert Pinsky accounts for an idealized naiveté Keats attributed to the nightingale in The Situation of Poetry. A poet can envy the animal’s seeming presence and absorption in the moment. I’m not entirely sure Rice intends to connect the poet so closely to the hare, however. Because the poem turns at the “patience” line to a first-person account of the poet’s actions, and what he was thinking. Given the quick clarity, and how that contrasts with what came before and what follows, I’ll quote it.
[the gunshots] gave me an impression of patience and careful
selection. As I walked toward them, I paused
now and again beside the river to read, make
note of images that evoked, for reasons
I couldn’t explain, a feeling of desire.
I’m in the middle of Rice’s poetry book, An Image Not a Book, so I have more perspective on his poetic use of clarity. Or at least kind of meditative clarity that appears here. Because Rice’s poems often occupy a state of mind, a thinking through, with the natural world sounding into the poem using kaleidoscopic methods. In the book, I can sense the poet’s reluctance to indulge a forbidden love. And the complications that surround that.
It’s not often I find his poems living with him, passing record of his actions. He’s often a Poet in the poems—a central figure who interacts and thinks about the world via misshapen language. This middle portion of “Feldhase” is such a tender passage. It shifts the register from the poem’s opening. And, significantly, it lands the poem’s concern squarely on “desire.” For “reasons / I couldn’t explain.” And I find when Rice takes the opportunity to explicitly reveal the poem’s central concern, the piece blooms with complexity. Like one of those sped-videos of flowers in bloom.
Which is what each sentence following this middle passage accomplishes. From a VR headset’s presentation of landscape even to the peripheral vision to the action of a pocket watch lid to a fawn walking on hardwood floors. It’s reality as multiplicity and the poet’s readings that can both lavish in their particularities and in their congruence and in their accumulative account, like phenomenology but viewed through that animal “gaze” alluded to with the title. To the point the poet closes the poem writing in his notebook: “Reality opened before me.” And in my mind I think, “Yes. It did. Like the multiple blooms of a hydrangea in early fall.”