To Know Something is to Kill It: Colin Cheney's Here Be Monsters

       What follows is an eerie, beautiful unfolding of doubt and mystery. German Shepherds are confused with coyotes, water guns seem just as threatening as metal and bullets, and the water is always hiding something. The disappearance of the inscription “Here Be Monsters” on those ancient maps has lulled us into false security; Cheney’s collection reminds us that we are not safe.
       Mixing Biblical and Greek mythology, Darwinism, and ekphrastic musings into a modern, though not necessarily urban, landscape, Cheney creates a world where the only action one is capable of is reaction. In “Watson and the Shark,” we see the human subject’s inability to navigate around death, quite literally because a dead whale has entered the mouth of a canal and gotten stuck:

Maybe they wait for the canal, in thunderstorm,
to reverse course & return the corpse 
to sea on its acres of rain.
Or haul him up Red Hook’s 
shore, by the grain elevator, to be butchered
& driven to the fields of Fresh Kills
to sleep, unable to decay, in the leachate & graves.

       There is doubt, hesitation, trepidation, and no answer, no way to circumvent the gigantic model of death blocking the waterway. Again and again, Cheney shows his reader that death and destruction are inevitable: a young girl inadvertently drinks poison, nettles and thistles pop up in unconventional and inconvenient places, an unconvinced soldier shoots a dead man for good measure. And yet, like Jonah, a figure that Cheney returns to repeatedly, we must not only weather this storm, we must let it inhabit us. Jonah enters the belly of the fish and, in doing so, becomes a part of that which should destroy him, which is precisely what saves him. Cheney’s speaker, in the final poem of the series, finds inside himself the water that has been a source of fear and destruction throughout the collection: 

On the train south, the salt marshes
wake me whenever we cross water,
saying we are fucking inside you,
so caught up in light we can hardly bear it.

       But the most pervasive image throughout the collection is that of birds. The cover of Here Be Monsters is a photograph entitled “Mattie with a Northern Red-Shafted Flicker, Laverty Ranch, Idaho, 2005.” It displays a young woman holding an ornate bird by its wings; it is unclear whether she is holding the bird together or about to rip it apart. This cover, unlike many gracing the covers of contemporary poetry collections, is no abstraction. It is a promise. Cheney’s pages are filled with birds and the myths that accompany them. In “How We Were Spared,” birds serve as models, sources of hope for humans:

Pheonix, reports Pliny, build nests of cinnamon

& frankincense, so maybe we’ll be alright.
Let’s agree that oysters have no senses

& that the air was safe to breathe.
Hawks don’t eat hearts of other birds

& we take care of our own.

The positions that nature and birds inhabit over the course of the collection change with every poem. At times, birds are sources of pleasure and beauty. Other times, they bring with them contamination and disease. Again Cheney illustrates that nothing—including nature—is to be trusted.
Cheney’s poetry is not an easy read, however. Readers looking for some sort of over-arching narrative will not only be disappointed, they will be frustrated by Cheney’s wild leaps and associations. Take, for example, this excerpt from “Half Ourselves and Half Not”:

If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,
saltwater stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins.

Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us,
influenced by the sphere of angels.

Here, then—thumbnail sketches
for zoning changes along the riparian bank

of the species boundary, for chimera. 

While not completely unfounded, these leaps in time, scene, and diction could perplex the reader, leaving him ungrounded and alone. And while Cheney bridges these gaps with music—the unexpected alliteration of “saltwater stained,” the metrical balance of “thumbnail sketches”—there will be readers who are not willing to follow Cheney along. 
Formally, the poems attempt to explore the possibilities of the page, but Cheney seems most comfortable when writing in tightly-regimented stanzas, single-stanza poems, or the couplet. Poems that diverge from these forms, such as portions of “Watson and the Shark” and “Stabat Mater (Marie Curie’s Pitchblende),” seem less confident than pieces like “Ars Poetica with Vulture,” which is composed of tercets with a closing couplet. The restraint offered in the forms Cheney uses most often is necessary in order to balance the wildness of his images—the poems that lack this structure have less grounding them.

Someone once told me they didn’t like poetry because poets always seem to think they know more than their audience. There may be some poets like that out there, but Colin Cheney doesn’t want to be one of them. Though his poems are at times puzzling and difficult, Cheney’s speaker in Here Be Monsters seems comfortable only in the act of not knowing. The collection is a striking and, at times, disturbing evaluation of a contemporary mind. Myth, history, science, religion, and nature mingle helter-skelter throughout the collection if only to prove that nothing can be trusted. In Here Be Monsters, the reader is promised only one thing—that truth is dangerous and certainty is merely a legend.