Who Needs Pumpkin Spice When You've Got a Safari?
By ML Wolters
Fall is back. It’s brought along its sudden chill and annual pumpkin assortments. We’re nearing another winter—though this one hopefully milder than the last.
For those of you who are not quite ready to succumb to pumpkin spice lattes and cider donuts, there’s hope yet! Published earlier this year, Donna O’Connell-Gilmore’s Africa is the Mother Who Lies in the Grass: Poems on Safari is enough to transport you back to those humid, brutal ninety-degree heat waves of July and August; simply curl up next to the fireplace (or radiator) with a mountain of pillows and start reading.
O’Connell-Gilmore’s collection is ten poems long, layered with incredible woodwork by Olaf Kruger. These detailed carvings are given a full-page each, and rightfully so. The woodcuts capture an aspect of the safari that cannot be justified by words alone. O’Connell-Gilmore and Kruger’s pieces combined produce an experience unlike any other.
Africa is the Mother Who Lies in the Grass, while short, spans as wide as the safari’s grasslands in subject and style. There is a poem about an elephant overshadowed by a single cicada and another that flirts with danger. There is even mention of antelope dung. The collection makes the most of its subjects in a concise and powerful way, often utilizing juxtapositions and suspense to reveal insights. O’Connell-Gilmore’s treatment of nature is particularly striking; the behavior and lives of the wild animals are tied into comparisons and concurrence with human interactions, creating a sameness. This sameness exists in us living things as we struggle through harshness and beauty and tradition.
In fact, the two worlds of “human” and “un-human” embrace within the first poem, as the speaker, awed at the swift appearance of a bat, began to stroke its fur, earning the name “Batgirl” from fellow travelers. The union is less obvious in most pieces, like “A Skeletal Cheetah with a Dwarfed Cub Stares at Family of Cheetahs Gorging,” for example. Its opposing imagery inspires a cruel sight, but there is no sign of the safari savagery that arises in other poems. But it is this sense of logic that perhaps makes it most attuned to the human experience.
Cheetahs do not challenge
another cheetah’s kill.
Ones bound
to watch others thrive.
While O’Connell-Gilmore’s notion of sameness is prominent and important to her safari collection, it is certainly not the only topic, which is why this ten-piece work is such a beautiful, relentless masterpiece. There is Darwinism, there is mob mentality, there is all-encompassing fear. There is hope and there is family. Gender roles are challenged. Traces of sexuality are tucked between lines. Through it all is the safari, where you are quickly lost “in a spell of wandering // amongst a whorl of wildebeests and zebras // fanned out as far as the eye can see.”
And the mother who lies in the grass waits for you.
For those of you who are not quite ready to succumb to pumpkin spice lattes and cider donuts, there’s hope yet! Published earlier this year, Donna O’Connell-Gilmore’s Africa is the Mother Who Lies in the Grass: Poems on Safari is enough to transport you back to those humid, brutal ninety-degree heat waves of July and August; simply curl up next to the fireplace (or radiator) with a mountain of pillows and start reading.
O’Connell-Gilmore’s collection is ten poems long, layered with incredible woodwork by Olaf Kruger. These detailed carvings are given a full-page each, and rightfully so. The woodcuts capture an aspect of the safari that cannot be justified by words alone. O’Connell-Gilmore and Kruger’s pieces combined produce an experience unlike any other.
Africa is the Mother Who Lies in the Grass, while short, spans as wide as the safari’s grasslands in subject and style. There is a poem about an elephant overshadowed by a single cicada and another that flirts with danger. There is even mention of antelope dung. The collection makes the most of its subjects in a concise and powerful way, often utilizing juxtapositions and suspense to reveal insights. O’Connell-Gilmore’s treatment of nature is particularly striking; the behavior and lives of the wild animals are tied into comparisons and concurrence with human interactions, creating a sameness. This sameness exists in us living things as we struggle through harshness and beauty and tradition.
In fact, the two worlds of “human” and “un-human” embrace within the first poem, as the speaker, awed at the swift appearance of a bat, began to stroke its fur, earning the name “Batgirl” from fellow travelers. The union is less obvious in most pieces, like “A Skeletal Cheetah with a Dwarfed Cub Stares at Family of Cheetahs Gorging,” for example. Its opposing imagery inspires a cruel sight, but there is no sign of the safari savagery that arises in other poems. But it is this sense of logic that perhaps makes it most attuned to the human experience.
Cheetahs do not challenge
another cheetah’s kill.
Ones bound
to watch others thrive.
While O’Connell-Gilmore’s notion of sameness is prominent and important to her safari collection, it is certainly not the only topic, which is why this ten-piece work is such a beautiful, relentless masterpiece. There is Darwinism, there is mob mentality, there is all-encompassing fear. There is hope and there is family. Gender roles are challenged. Traces of sexuality are tucked between lines. Through it all is the safari, where you are quickly lost “in a spell of wandering // amongst a whorl of wildebeests and zebras // fanned out as far as the eye can see.”
And the mother who lies in the grass waits for you.
ML Wolters is an editor for The Cape Cod Poetry Review and a recent alumna from Wheaton College, Massachusetts, where she studied creative writing and history. Upon graduation, she was awarded with the Helen Meyers Tate Memorial Prize for Original Verse. She is a word nerd and the assistant of a New York Times bestselling author in Boston.