A frontier aesthetic powers Dion O’Reilly’s second book of poems, Sadness of the Apex Predator. (Her first, Ghost Dogs, was published in 2020.) In Apex we enter a wild west that exists in the poet’s showdown with a brutal past. So much to chew on. O’Reilly’s new poems persist long after the pages have been turned.
Sadness perfumes this collection’s four sections. And while it might be helpful to characterize O’Reilly as a nature poet, or an autobiographical one, her free-range foraging defies an easy brand.
Raised on ranchlands, O’Reilly brings a maverick’s voice to her lore of wasted love and calculated risk. She knows how to relish the pain she endured from those who loved her. Crossing genres with ease, uncensored and raw, her memory roams the corridors of visceral intimacy. I sense the wry voice of Dickinson swung through the ecstasy of Whitman, salted with Neil Young.
Part One explores ancestry, evolution, the cyclical nature of hunger, predation, cruelty and satiation. Both predator and prey sit side by side and talk to us. O’Reilly believes, with Eliot, that nature’s cycles are brutal and inevitable:
the biggest lie about the past/is that it’s past.
The book’s second suite revisits a life-altering encounter with fire, and the poet’s slow recovery from serious burns as an analogue for the grotesque cruelty of her mother. Reinforced by feisty wit, O’Reilly here imbeds small explosions of scorn, landmines of shock to puzzle her reader.
Clinical, yet gleaming with sudden humor, these pieces probe the emotional silence of her family during the trauma she endured, and a year spent as a teenager in a burn unit. “My older sister’s body was made of men,” O’Reilly notes of a sibling whose vicious beauty mocked her own disfigurement.
As forensic poet, O’Reilly shifts gears when we least expect it. No eulogies for lost beauty. She is a flawed girl of the golden west who’s seen a thing or two—hot pain, hot fun—echoing the Eagles’ “Desperado”—“these things that are pleasin’ you can hurt you somehow.”
Spare and unsparing, perhaps more dramatic than her influential contemporary Dorianne Laux, resisting the redemptive optimism of close colleague Danusha Lameris, O’Reilly blazes an erratic path. She refuses to package her urgent life into relatable anecdotes.
In “Defects” she insists,
some memories never wash out. They travel/
through generations like sickle-cell, hemophilia,/
blood-blemish, stigmata.
Splitting open the hard fruit of experience, O’Reilly extracts kernels of brutal beauty. This book is a miniature epic of the West Coast poetic genre. It belongs with Stroud, Jeffers, Laux and Addonizio. However, O’Reilly still has more layers to excavate, and this reader looks forward to her unraveling darker mysteries, the ones that lead to Seuss territory.
Memories and loneliness—the true themes of this collection—gather in the final section’s poems, scented by the wildness just outside her Santa Cruz Mountains doorstep. In “Wolf,” O’Reilly confesses, “I’m trying to forget a man/I don’t want to forget.” Patsy Cline blowing kisses to Bob Dylan. Men, the ones she wanted, the ones who left, are met on the trails she recalls, always outrunning the childhood cruelty she can’t help but savor.
In “Mariana” she asks,
Why do I drift on memories? Conjure what I lost, repeat the loss again and again? How many times have I returned to a mother who savaged me? Searched for her again and again in the bodies of men—their eyes burnished like hers as she beat me— blood prick of a needle, then bliss as I recut memory’s diamond.
O’Reilly’s eccentric music is potent. Open any page in The Sadness of the Apex Predator and I’ll bet you can hum along.
Lit Chat with Dion O’Reilly takes place Friday, August 2, 6-7:30pm, at Tannery Arts Center, 1050 River St., Studio 118, Santa Cruz. catamaranliteraryreader.com. O’Reilly’s new book can be purchased at Bookshop Santa Cruz, Two Birds in Capitola and online.
