For Perillo, nature is more than a symbol or an objective correlative for human desire and endeavor. Our human tendency to abstract nature or to aestheticize it may be just our way of evading nature and imagining ourselves, somehow and against compelling evidence, to be immune from its inevitabilities. We are nature, not its master. What may distinguish us from the animals is the capacity to mourn, especially to mourn for what we have not yet lost. However, Perillo also discovers in nature her own capacity for joy and humor, as well as a template for human incongruity.

In the final chapter, “From the Bardo Zone,” the author describes a creek where frenzied salmon come to spawn and die. Her text is entitled Bardo Thodol, which most people know as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, but that she prefers in Robert Thurman’s translation as the book of natural liberation through understanding the in-between. An electric scooter allows her to visit the spawning creek where she notices people’s not-uncommon gazes of admiring pity (or pitying admiration):

In “Medicine,” Perillo describes her incredulous experiences with alternative healing therapies, motivated by the strange cocktail that catastrophic illness mixes for us: one part desperation for our condition, one part sorrow for the desperation of our friends and families, one part earnest hope that a cure is “out there” undiscovered. Her mother recommends a holistic physician; the holistic physician refers her to another physician who recommends vitamin supplements and refers her to a dentist for the removal of metal tooth fillings; a colleague recommends a Chinese doctor (with limited English); she finds a Jin Shin Jitsu practitioner; going to another physician she discovers that he attributes disease to sexual dysfunction (and administers pelvic exams for all his female patients regardless of their symptoms); a psychic healer; homeopath; acupuncturist. These are narrated deadpan, with wry self-mockery and no self-pity. Any one of us who has experienced disappointments with modern technological medicine understands the need to find alternatives, at least as rituals of hope. I recognized in Perillo’s account some of the hopeful bargaining in which I have engaged with chronic but not life-threatening illness.

What recommends I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature by this ruthless naturalist is its willingness to find meaning in the body’s relationship to nature and its refusal to imagine that we are exempt from nature’s seasons.

A poet herself, Perillo offers shrewd commentary on other poets. “Dickinson wrote,” she observes in “Gulls,” “explicitly stating her satisfaction with using whatever nature is at hand. It takes courage to spend time considering nature when your life is circumscribed, because this means considering what you have lost” (p. 11). Whitman is a pretender, struggling to preserve his “cunningly orchestrated public persona as the vigorous avatar of America in its entirety” (p. 61) after a stroke in his late fifties. Marianne Moore, Perillo discovers, was less interested in the actual Mt. Rainier (the subject of one of Moore’s poems) than in “the geography she was most passionate about, which was the landscape of her poem” (p. 85). Of the poetry of the consumptive physician John Keats, in contrast, Perillo writes:

Lucia Perillo is paying attention, both to the subtle topography of her inner landscape and to the naturescape of which we are a part. Her fearless and anti-sentimental essays reminded me of Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, a far more polemical and certainly less lyrical examination of some of the same bodyscape. In Perillo, however, stridency is replaced by an elegiac stoicism. What recommends I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature by this ruthless naturalist is its willingness to find meaning in the body’s relationship to nature and its refusal to imagine that we are exempt from nature’s seasons.