Thacker, To Wildness, Cover

TO WILDNESS

PoemsJulia Thacker
Publication (US): March 11th, 2025
Publication (UK): May 6th, 2025

£10.99

Winner of the nineteenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Paul Muldoon, Judge

In recipes, spells, odes and elegies, To Wildness conjures what has been lost and what remains. These are poems of the body. They rub up against one another and knock elbows. Plum Jam calls preserving fruit as spiritual labor: To be elbow deep in a barrel/arms gloved crimson. In this collection, the dead reside alongside the living. Ancestors roost in trees, having forgotten language, their coats inside out. Others sulk in the eaves, their ears clogged with clover. The past made vivid renders an extravagant present and offers a balm to the isolation of the contemporary world.

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ISBN: 9781911379164 Extent: 88pp Category:

TO WILDNESS

Teeming with image, sensation and sound, the poems in To Wildness tumble us into a glorious exuberance of catalog and character, rural landscape and dark imaginings (‘We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plums / when he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.’). Ancestral voices speak from the grave; fabulist figures like the girl buried with a finch tell their stories; and contemporary ghosts only the narrator sees abound (‘Let me touch them as they pass’). A southern gothic atmosphere hovers here: shapes twisting in the dark and the language to conjure them near. What a rich and thrilling collection! — Joan Houlihan, It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest

To Wildness is wildly alive—inventive and spunky and all over the map: from Bigfoot to Xanax to persimmons to Anna Karenina. In ‘When he said Sell a book, I heard Sail,’ the speaker confesses that she ‘wanted to hold the sky like a bowl, smudge the clouds. / Bring a sentence to its knees.’ That she does—and more! — Ellen Doré Watson, pray me stay eager

 

Two poems from Julia Thacker’s To Wildness

Braid Him into the Earth

Knee-high coffin of wicker, earth-boat floating through the woods.
Wrap him in heather, the old way. Hold a pocket mirror under his nose.
Say of him what we say of fathers.

If one of you has a three-string, then a tune.
Boots, stamp away spirits. If the ground is frozen,
dig shallow, spade ringing through ice, shale, mica-shine.

Lower the basket in a tangle of ginseng root, because I can’t.
Let well water seep into crevices, mineral, like nickels
on the tongue. Skin freckling in feldspar, beetle, slug.

If flood waters drift the body loose, let him not be found by a child.
Let bones wash up with clay pipes, beads, thumb-size skulls.
Let them whiten and scatter in blond fields.

Julia Thacker

 

God Denies Any Knowledge of Dead Angel in His Bed

He searches Heaven’s cabinets for a hangover cure.
Combs knotted stars from his beard.
Sets the morning agenda. To the blind shepherd
he dictates a note: The wind is blue.
And what of tsunamis, wars?
Macedonian wells infested with bees?
God has a headache. His hands tremble.
He cannot look at the heap of sheets,
her celestial body, marcelled bob, cold
in his chamber. No one understands
that he is full of duende. Not the swarm of angels,
their platinum regiment rapping
at his windows, rattling doors, voices sharp
and clear, Why? God covers his ears.

 

Julia Thacker

 

Excerpts

Two poems from Julia Thacker's To Wildness

Braid Him into the Earth

Knee-high coffin of wicker, earth-boat floating through the woods.
Wrap him in heather, the old way. Hold a pocket mirror under his nose.
Say of him what we say of fathers.

If one of you has a three-string, then a tune.
Boots, stamp away spirits. If the ground is frozen,
dig shallow, spade ringing through ice, shale, mica-shine.

Lower the basket in a tangle of ginseng root, because I can't.
Let well water seep into crevices, mineral, like nickels
on the tongue. Skin freckling in feldspar, beetle, slug.

If flood waters drift the body loose, let him not be found by a child.
Let bones wash up with clay pipes, beads, thumb-size skulls.
Let them whiten and scatter in blond fields.

Julia Thacker

 

God Denies Any Knowledge of Dead Angel in His Bed

He searches Heaven's cabinets for a hangover cure.
Combs knotted stars from his beard.
Sets the morning agenda. To the blind shepherd
he dictates a note: The wind is blue.
And what of tsunamis, wars?
Macedonian wells infested with bees?
God has a headache. His hands tremble.
He cannot look at the heap of sheets,
her celestial body, marcelled bob, cold
in his chamber. No one understands
that he is full of duende. Not the swarm of angels,
their platinum regiment rapping
at his windows, rattling doors, voices sharp
and clear, Why? God covers his ears.

 

Julia Thacker

 

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