There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
Hamlet
Wild Pack of the Living by Eileen Cleary
Nixes Mate Books, 2024
Wild Pack of the Living, Eileen Cleary’s third book, is dedicated to all children taken from their homes. After the speaker and Steven are taken, “the rain on a leaf / no longer belonged to either of us.” The book is a testimony of hope in the face of the corruption of the young. Cleary takes on the overwhelming force of child abduction with a fierceness achieved through the figurative use of poetry. Like Marie Howe’s, What the Living Do, Cleary transforms darkness into glittering musicality.
The second poem of this collection, “Beyond the Tire Swing and the Toy Boats,” begins with a reliquary for a sparrow. What is disregarded is just as valuable as what is sanctified; this gorgeous book begins and ends with a sparrow whose beauty is fragile, persistent, and perpetual as the natural world.
amongst tossed bottles,
plastic bags,
cans rusted and a sparrow dead,
this hill shoulders the sky
Cleary’s use of the Homeric hill protecting this innocent bird’s funeral scene against the unknown calls back the epic Greek poets, clouds, the sky, and all things eternal. Steven Stayner was taken at age 7, and the poems elegize the boy and turn the star-stealer, raptor, innocence-eater into a Corpse Plant. We cannot get back lost innocence or heal children forced away from their homes and molested, but with her precise language, devotion to craft, and subtle imagery, Cleary bravely calls forth what has been lost and transforms it all through music and nature.
In “If Stevie Were Never Taken,” the false prophet and terrorizing psychopath is cruising for children in a Buick with church flyers and sleeping pills. The writer characterizes this malignancy as a consuming dragon, “more like eyes torching dry leaves in fire season.”
In the midst of this powerful first section “The Boy From Merced,” comes a shining poem, “Peach Canner To His Missing Son”: the innocent hour tills echoes Lowell. The lines, “A curve of blossoms overhead, and blossoms heavenward / petal this narrow prayer” convey a singular prayer surrounded by invisible divinity that the reader is invited to experience. The hard consonants surround the softer ones, cradling the sound: “Sapwood chants Restore the sun.” The peach canner imagines his lost son in the rows of peach trees “blushed pink by a meadow-birthing star.” This poem is a tribute to Paul Nemser (1950-2023), and in these orchards, the boy is still mourned and missed: “I am calling you back to theorchard, the orchard I must / one day abandon.”These images are worth returning to again and again, each time yielding something new and glorious.
The second section titled “Missing” includes the poem “The Interstate Spills.” As the captor sets up shop, the poem ends with hidden beauty:
impossible to know who will pass through.
Or when. For now, a cardinal trills life—life.
Soon the wind through the honeysuckle,
hornets shying outside their paper nests
next to a ladder set out since yesterday’s rain.
In many ways, this poem is declarative in that it resembles the book’s title. In Wild Pack of the Living, there is hope even in darkness. Cleary brings a voice to the unspeakable. In “Thirteen Reasons Stevie’s Seven Years Late From School”:
He washes and rinses the boy’s mind
Leaves it blowing on the line
The reversal and replacement of an image of clothes drying in the wind, often a positive domestic memory, for Stevie becomes a haunting image of irrevocable damage done by a predator. This book is a clarion cry for these young souls too early taken.
There is an aspect of revenge in the reincarnation of the predator in “Reincarnation Story: Parnell Transmigrates Into a Corpse Plant” when the poet imagines the old Parnell dying in a nursing home, still propositioning the nurse, bidding on local children:
In the old body,
he stalked and trapped a new boy
nearly every seven years.
Now, he manifests as a wound.
In a short section of only two poems called “Jane Doe,” a haibun closes on this haiku: “The hunter moons spills / over a gathering / of blue-men, blue-lit.” The surreal image is proceeded by a meditation on children’s clothing and followed by a sudden and violent violation.
The final poem returns to the sparrow. “Weather Report” has the seeming objectivity of one delivering the news, but news fraught with past seasons. Three-fourths of the way into the poem: “But let’s not fret about Christmas / decorations from our past.” Why? Because “if we live long enough / we pause when the ground softens, the woodpile dampens, or a sparrow’s song is close enough to touch.” It is the song of the little sparrow that brings us as close as we can ever get to the beauty of this world worth living.
Not many poets are capable of taking on the predators who kidnap and hurt children. Cleary is the archangel and redeemer of children whose voices and innocence have been taken.
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Gloria Monaghan is a professor at Wentworth University. She has published seven collections of poetry. Her seventh book, Diary of Saint Marion (Lily Poetry Review, 2025), was featured at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (2025). Her poems have appeared in Nixes Mate, NPR, Poem-a-Day, Lily Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Quartet, and River Heron, among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award and the Griffin Prize. She has also been nominated for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. Thanks to a Bistline Grant from Wentworth Institute, she recently completed a film on the painter Nancy Ellen Craig, Daughter of Rubens, which was accepted into the 2023 Provincetown Film Festival. She is currently working on another film about the Dominican painter Jose Ricon Mora.