Elephants by Nicelle Davis and Cheryl Gross
Business Bear Press, 2017
Mess up Elephants.
This chapbook begs to get dog-eared, rolled up in a pocket, or knocked around in a backpack. Sometimes you’ll want to focus on the words of Nicelle Davis, and sometimes you’ll want to stare at the pictures by Cheryl Gross. Just take it with you, and pull it out, and mull Elephants over.
I am writing to ask,
do you know there’ll soon be no more elephants?
{…}Please help. I
cannot understand, what of Ivory
is worth more than Elephants?
At once in the book’s opening, “Last Letter,” we encounter the tone of clarity and emotion that characterizes the whole volume.
I’ll confess that at this point, I was still a bit leery. How was this going to work as poetry and be anything other than bleeding-heart, tendentious rhetoric? Actually, one of the shortest pieces in this collection barely avoids that flaw.
IV.
Into piano keys.
Tickle the ivories,
practice
playing with death.
But Davis’s elephant guides immediately ground her again in her gift for specificity.
V.
The hatchet remains lodged in the center. Oozing
wet-red from soft pink flesh. Vaginal. The mind
eases into this space, entering the swollen
injury. The living head inside the dead. Cerebral
suffering is an uncomfortable pleasure.
She has, like William Carlos Williams, “something urgent/{…} to say to you.”
Elephants develops into much more than an environmental lament. Yes, Davis provides succinct and interesting information about elephants and their plight; and some pieces introduce us to individual animals and their torments: Grace, Shirley, the one with the hacked-open face… but these pages also reveal Nicelle Davis’s personal wounds.
Inside Elephants is the story of a life-battered woman, one who is trying to raise a compassionate boy alone, ambivalent about her son growing into his manhood.
When was the last time I
trusted a man? Soon my son will be a man.
In the course of her Elephants ordeal, the writer grows wiser about herself:
I drew elephants as an excuse to look for hours
at wounds—imagining every crevasse as a door
leading into—
Into what but the love so great it might annihilate? At the outset, the poet writes in “Last Letter,” “I loved you like void.”
She leaves us with an exhortation to reconciliation:
Free: we would be windows.
Safe: we would see elephants.
These poems, choosing poetry’s enlightening function, become our windows.
We see the elephants.
Cheryl Gross’s superb illustrations – no: artworks – imaginatively conceived and intricately composed, bring a touch of whimsy to this booklet, which you’ll be glad to carry with you. You might learn something about elephants, about being human, about yourself.
Becca Menon is the author of The Riddle and The Sphinx and others.