:: M y T a k e O n :: THE DEER, by Wendy Burk

The Deer, by Wendy Burk
(Finishing Line Press, Georgetown, Kentucky, 2004)

While reading Wendy Burk’s chapbook, The Deer, I couldn’t help but recall an exhibit I saw at SFMOMA recently: “The Vico Portfolio” by printer, book designer, and typographer Jack Stauffacher. It was inspired by the philosopher Giambattista Vico’s 18th Century text, The New Science. This was all a part of a large exhibition entitled, “Belles Lettres: The Art of Typography.”

Stauffacher prefaces his typographical works with an excerpt from The New Science, where Vico discusses the different ways in which humans understand/misunderstand nature. As I understood it, Vico observed that humans often attempt to understand nature by relating it to the human body, using nature as a metaphor for the body. He suggested that a more fruitful means of knowing nature would be to recognize how much we do not understand it; instead of bringing it into our world, we should go into nature’s world.

In The Deer, Burk allows us to see in a way that is similar to what Vico describes. The natural world is central and the speaker uses her knowledge from the human-made world to reach out and try to understand it. In “Fire Poem,” she uses a human-made object as a metaphor to describe the sound of living beings in nature: “the song of birds like an elevator”. The poems are filled with such wonderment, as if the person were seeing the world for the first time and searching for ways to understand it all. In “Forest Poem,” she tries to understand who she is in the world and what it expects from her:


The light is absolutely still.

The light is always still in a forest

only the trees move under it,

when the sun goes down it seems

it is only the trees closing up overhead.


Why don’t they want you to leave?
Why do they want to keep you here forever?
What do they think you can do?


The speaker’s unique outlook lends a sense of humility to her voice.

Burk is a keen observer and participant in her surroundings. It’s all a bit disorienting, but in a good way, a profound way. Writers so often use nature as a tool to make an image or experience sound more profound than it actually is, or as a flourish to make poems “pretty”; Burke, however, does not take the world around her for granted. “The Deer” is one of those books that has helped me see my place in the world, and my place inside myself, in new ways. I felt a bit misplaced while reading it, yet also more grounded than ever before. Thank you, Wendy Burk.



(excerpts printed with permission from the author)