I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature BY Lucia Perillo Trinity University Press, 2009) From the Publisher: “During her days as a park ranger, Lucia Perillo loved nothing more than to hike the Cascade Mountains alone, taking special pride in her daring solo skis down the raw, unpatrolled slopes of Mount Rainier. Then in her thirties she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing Perillo confronts, in stark but often comic terms, the ironies and losses of going from an outdoors person to someone who can no longer walk. With unusual candor and a restless intelligence, Perillo writes about how to lower one’s expectations just enough for a wilderness experience, what it’s like to experience eros as a sick person, and how poetry provides an alternative means to access nature…”

“About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” W.H. Auden famously asserted, and the Ancient Masters more so. The god who bestowed on humankind the gifts of light, reason and poetry, could also send the arrows of plague, as we learn at the beginnings of Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. “Account no man happy ‘til he dies,” the chorus reminds us as the blind king is led into exile. Popular responses to catastrophic illness tend to veer toward the sentimental: How I Fought Disease, or alternatively, How My Disease Made Me a Better Person. As the late Susan Sontag observed many years ago, we inflect our illnesses with moral significance. Although many people find these narratives consoling or even inspirational, Lucia Perillo does not, even while multiple sclerosis is dismantling her neuromuscular system, circumscribing a life that once relished physical freedom in the wilderness. Her response is more than just whistling past the graveyard. Like a face full of Pacific Northwest stream water (of which Perillo keenly writes), this small collection of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, is a temporary stay against sentimentalism by facing her body’s insults without flinching, talking herself into courage. Perillo’s title adverts, of course, to T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” but here there is no mermaids’ song. However, there is “Birdsong” in which our poet offers an extended reflection on the human presence in the natural disorder and the human tendency to try to order it. She attempts to learn to identify birds’ songs, providing readers with visual doodles and verbal homonyms to capture the rising, turning, falling of the songs: What appeals to me in birds’ songs is the unabashedness of their desires, blasting so loudly I can almost forget my own body as I lie there listening while the sun climbs above the eastward mountains. — p. 167 Recalling Peter Matthiessen’s anecdote of a mountain-top holy man, Perillo remarks: …he doesn’t let fretting after knowledge interfere with his listening and the music’s nameless seeping-in, as he sits in his spot in the Himalayas where the soil is too thick to allow for burial and the human dead are chopped up and left for birds to eat… The birds that take part in the “sky funeral” are vultures, birds that portion off the dead. And I can find no entry for vulture on the definitive [birdsong audio] tape, no song or call or chatter or whinny or drum. These graveyard-workers, the tidy-uppers of mortality, remain resolutely mute. — p. 176

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.