Lupine

Jenny Irish’s Lupine gives us folk tales refracted through a black crystal. The unlucky heroes are wolfdogs, women branded witches, and other scapegoats pushed to society’s fringes.

Yet these outsiders know the score. Like a logician guiding the reader through a proof, Irish’s poems lay bare the reasons behind misogyny and other perversions. For instance:

While some witch panics seem genuinely inspired by fear and religious fervor, America’s history of inquisition, when dissected, is a story of jealousies and resentments.

Such lucid expository passages alternate arrestingly with flights rich in dense sound play and archetypal imagery:

No lullabies. Farmland plowed and harrowed. No girl left fallow. Take me to the river. Show me where the deadfall caught the body. No more pretty, pretty. No more use for an ivory comb.

This tonal weaving between the dispassionate and the impassioned appeals to heart and mind by turns.

A posthumous half-wolf speaker describes how a hunting party tracked him down:

[...] the blood slick slit, my belly bared, reveals itself, when coaxed, as the evidence of her end, her whole hand attached to a wrist, the wrist attached to an arm, thin and strong, but that is all the whole of the girl that there is.

Dear whole hand, dear heartbroke hunter, dear hamstrung hope. I am part dog, part wolf, all dead.

I might have wanted a life too.

This and other assertions of humanity—expressed with sorrow, not rancor—form the most devastating charge against the persecutors.

A flower sparkles above these heartsick stories—the lupine, which flourishes on barren land. “Lupine is named for the wolf because concealed inside the flower is a fang.” When it sprouts, it evokes the indomitable strength the dispossessed can muster.