The Lions

by Peter Campion

Big Avalanche Ravine

Just the warning light on a blue crane.

Just mountains. Just the mist that skimmed

them both and bled to silver rain

lashing the condominiums.

But there it sank on me. This urge

to carve a life from the long expanse.

To hold some ground against the surge

of sheer material. It was a tense

and persistent and metallic shiver.

And it stayed, that tremor, small and stark

as the noise of the hidden river

fluming its edge against the dark.

 

In his second collection of poems, Peter Campion writes about the struggle of making a life in America, about the urge “to carve a space” for love and family from out of the vast sweep of modern life. Coursing between the political and personal with astonishing ease, Campion writes at one moment of his disturbing connection to the public political structure, symbolized by Robert McNamara (who makes a startling appearance in the title poem), then in the next, of a haunting reverie beneath a magnolia tree, representing his impulse to escape the culture altogether. He moves through various forms just as effortlessly, as confident in rhymed quatrains as in slender, tensed free verse. In The Lions, Campion achieves a fusion of narrative structure and lyric intensity that proves him to be one of the very best poets of his generation.

 

Praise for Other People          

“Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.”—David Biespiel, The Oregonian

 

 

Genres: Poetry

63 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Campion's poetry is emblematic of the finest work being written today. His poetic sensibility is virtuosic because it is rooted in a prosody intimate with the literary canon, simultaneously blooming into the ethereal mystery that connects all art and life. He enacts in his work the high standard against which he measures others' work, as defined in his lucid recent essay in Poetry entitled "Strangers." In it he defines metaphorical sense as "a type of inventiveness that can appear even when metaphor seems absent. It's not merely a knack for crafting comparisons without 'like' or 'as,' but the ability to establish far-reaching connections, as well as disjunctions, in consciousness."

This metaphorical sense is never better demonstrated than in his new book, The Lions. Long before Campion's lions make their inevitable appearance in the lines of "Simile," an ars poetica fully one-third the way into the book, we have felt their proleptic presence in practically every poem. From "the blacktail deer [that] descend/Trembling. All systems on alert," in the opening "In Early March" to "all that force/falling through air" of "So Here Is How We Live Now," Campion's carefully chosen images effortlessly do their work of "implying the vision of a larger shape of being," to again quote Campion's essay.

Who are these ubiquitous beings that not only "shake out a clump of vertebra and sinews in their teeth to extract the sweetest meat," but also "rip reality from all the surfaces that flow around us."? This beautifully crafted and wonderfully inventive collection grapples convincingly with the question. Campion's capacious vision of the art of language emerges as one force amidst a dense landscape of life forms struggling for individual survival, all connected beneath the surface, including a lion in Botswana eating a kill, Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War), a man and woman having sex on a towel spread on a bathroom floor at a party ("a violence/only the kind they don't deny but relish) again, teeth clenched," "then this, then this, then this: life happening, each instant, rivers history" (from the title poem, "The Lions," part v.).

In this collection Campion puts flesh to the violence that resides bone-deep in existence with a pantheon of images in ways we knew and in ways we didn't know before--all lions releasing their "coiled lunge[s]," their "claws...regulators, rulers of the flow [of] reality lay[ing] hot beneath [them]." Again and again Campion portrays with quintessential craft and ideational nexus, a reality-seizing force that resides in all things, incapable of being titrated out, not making every conscious creature as bad as it can possibly be, but affecting each part of reality nonetheless.

[Joey Gamble · Rating 4 out of 5]

So lean! So taut! These poems are so tightly constructed. Brilliant.

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simile

The way on green alluvial islands where the Zambezi meets the Cuando
the lions (cubs scanning smudged horizons as the father drops his snout in gore)
shake out a clump of vertebra and sinews in their teeth to extract the sweetest meat
so we might call it “merciless”:
like that we rip reality from all the surfaces that flow
around us. And live in the amnesia of our doing it (I do) and so no end.

Capitalism

Darkened arcade
strobed with colors or

a million kilometer tunnel

centipeding

over the ocean floor:


how will I walk through here alone?

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Narrative poems about privilege, written from a point of view where the speaker's only self-interrogation is of the poem's privilege, and he -- the speaker -- its public spokesman, its unmarked, child's absorption of unaccountable access. The child of someone involved in the diplomatic corps, with Robert McNamara called out, in one poem, for his war crimes. I was interested in the tone of self-absorption, and in the prose sentences, which are frequently quite abstract: "Down on their towels, stoned, the couple stares | toward light of the year and month I was born." I have no idea what that means, and yet the tone of seriousness permeates it. If the book's speaker is going to have this privileged vantage from which to reflect on American exceptionalism, wouldn't we want to know something of the speaker as a father, a husband, a professional? The narrative does not incorporate these spheres. In short, it reproduces the very privilege it aims to critically engage.

[Abby · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a restlessness, a dissatisfaction in these poems that I really liked. Campion does have important things to say about the American dream and its disappointments, but I wonder why he uses such conventional form and diction to do so. Many of these poems felt too schooled and obedient to me for their messages of outrage to really ring true.