A Burst of Light from the Dark

In a memorable poem from Denton Loving’s collection Feller, two companions walk together alongside a woodland lake. They watch the sky for warblers, while out on the water, “turtles perch like hard-shelled gods.”

But as night falls, this bucolic encounter shifts into something richer and more intimate. “We canoe to the deepest part of the lake,” the speaker reveals, “before we can talk about who we were / before the other existed as witness.” Suspended together in a dream-like space of revelation and observance, this mutual witnessing can take place.

Loving’s poems create such spaces for us as we read, offering moments of heightened exchange between the human and nonhuman worlds. Here, the speaker tells us, “surrounded by water, by darkness, / is the only safe place to tell the truth.”

Feller joins Loving’s accomplished previous collections, 2015’s Crimes Against Birds and 2023’s Tamp. Tamp received the inaugural Tennessee Book Award for Poetry — a fitting honor, given that his poetry so deftly reflects the landscapes and perspectives of the Cumberland Gap region in East Tennessee where he grew up.  

Loving’s earlier work established his insightful grasp on nature’s role in his poetry, but Feller deepens and expands this vision, infusing the work with a passionate longing that fuels restless inquiries into our world’s greatest mysteries.

Feller’s opening series of poems follows a bluebird’s dream-world pursuit of a red fox, conjuring luminous spaces in which questions of desire, nonhuman perspectives, and the nature of existence seem to emanate from their peripheries like predawn mists. Bluebird expresses its yearning for Red Fox — the desire for a swap in perspective but also for a physical transformation. Through the merging of seeming opposites, Loving sparks moments of potent exchange:

                                      The fang
you buried in my neck’s rusted feathers—
I’ve plucked it out and planted it
in the garden beside the remnants
of my need. Watered it with my blood.
Now, I wait and wonder what will grow.

In poems like these, the nearness of sex and death takes the foreground. These are the sexiest transspecies bluebird poems you are likely to find.

Similarly, other poems feature striking expressions of dark and light, a juxtaposition heightened at times of spiritual threshold. “Careful! There’s a Man Inside the Belly of This Fish” complicates the common telling of the Jonah myth by introducing a hungry young woman on the shore, ready to clean the fish she’s just caught. “Light slits into the abyss, / reminds the shipman he’s alive.” A dark night of the soul, startled into new and unexpected light.

Another poem, “Budburst,” also captures this sense of abrupt spiritual motion. “Out of dormancy, sap rises / through winter-hardened vine,” the speaker tells us. “In my next life, I don’t want to / be the harvester or the harvest. // I want to be the budburst. / Those velvetlike lobes, // so diaphanous and sensuous / in the terrific unwinding—.” This moment of buoyant desire springs from the long seasons of dark “dormancy” that have preceded it. One cannot exist without the other.

Poems about the human-to-human realm highlight scenes rich with sensory detail and longing, illuminating what can rise from such rich elements brought together only here, only now, for this one unrepeatable moment. Strangers take their seats for a night flight. A woman bonds with a guy at the bar who reminds her of Jesus. Appetites of all kinds come together over breakfast at Nashville’s once-legendary Hermitage Café.

In “Letter to J,” the speaker reflects on the path of addiction taken by a former classmate, the dizzying ways that fates can diverge from a common point of origin: “You prove it’s dangerous to walk around our hometown, / our lives crashing backwards, choices barreling down / the mountain.”

The presence of the mountains is another recurring motif in Feller. “Returning” explores the dividedness of identity in relation to the land. The poem itself appears to unfold gently from a central spine, like “these / rolling Appalachians, / their foothills and low reliefs. / So my path unwinds / like cable-stitch / that twins and twists / but never breaks.”

“Optography” asserts that “Mountains are so good for our souls, / their durability might be mistaken for love.” But throughout Feller, we are reminded that the nonhuman world will only be subjected to our human-centered sentimentality for so long. Sooner or later, it will summon us back into a humbler, deeper experience of our world — even if its mysteries continue to elude our understanding.

In another poem, the speaker lies awake in the night, listening to the call of a whippoorwill. Knowing that whippoorwills have been absent from these woods for decades, his mind floods with questions for this bird somewhere out in the dark: “What makes him think things / will be different this time? What / calls him back? What sustains / this small nightjar’s blind bravery?”

“Marcescence” puzzles over a different phenomenon, one displayed by some plants and trees that don’t shed their leaves in winter but instead hold on to their withered leaves. “Strange how even a tree has desires. / Strange how until something new grows, // what no longer serves will cling.”

Loving’s poems dwell in surreal interstitial spaces. By slipping the bounds of everyday routine or the blinders of a human-centered perspective, Feller invites us to glimpse an ephemeral threshold. From here, renewal is possible. Maybe even transcendence.