Guidance from the God of Seahorses

In her first book of poems, Keats Conley assumes the personas of a range of animal gods as she meditates on the extraordinary diversity of the animal kingdom and on its rapid dwindling in our era of mass extinction. These personas are invoked in the titles of each poem in this collection, as in “The God of Sandhill Cranes” and “The God of Madrone Butterflies,” though in each case the particular persona feels unique, and the poems themselves vary considerably in style and approach. In the opening poem, “The God of Coyotes,” the speaker is in true godlike command: “I crafted you from the shadow of a cumulus cloud, straying over open plains,” while in “The God of Giant Palouse Earthworms” the tone is perfectly ordinary: “I read about you in the weekly.”

Throughout this collection, Conley skillfully interweaves the structures of poetic language and of anatomy. In “The God of Raccoons,” the speaker moves from dense scientific verbiage—studded with alliteration and assonance—to a more spiritual realm, contrasting images of earthly matters with those of heavenly worship, to startling effect: “In plantigrade movement, metatarsals greet ground. Listen closely to the peristalsis of earthworms. Watch light bend like limbs through water. Construct churches in crawlspaces, tree cavities, abandoned cars.”

The god personas are a charming starting point for these poems, but the poet herself is never far removed from the work, her own sadness over the loss of biodiversity inflecting nearly every poem and informing her particular focus on critically endangered species. Still, the personas reinforce the fact that it is indeed we, as humans, who bear the guilt for what is gone and who are responsible for what remains. “Life,” Conley notes in “The God of Humans,” “is an unperfected practice.”