Synopses & Reviews
In his debut collection, Colin Cheney maps an American landscape of New York rooftop gardens, occupied Iraq, and crumbling New England farms. In poems inhabited by Charles Darwin and climate scientists, Beethoven and Elliott Smith, the reader finds a way to navigate the beauty and fears native to modern life. One sees in Cheney’s poetry the convergence of the urban and the natural and the ways in which the two inhabit each other—an uneasy coexistence at best, but the only kind possible.
Pollination and endangerment loom large in Here Be Monsters, as do the binaries of creation and destruction. A whale dies trapped under a bridge; bees kept in rooftop gardens lose their way; a friend stricken by malaria is taken to an urban hospital that doesn’t recognize the disease; a woman cremates her beloved dog in her pottery kiln and finds, the next morning, two perfect clay lungs among the ashes. In his poems Cheney explores the various types of damage with which humans are so closely entwined, including our encroachment on nature, our propensity to give in to our worst impulses, and the havoc that our cells can wreak on our own bodies.
Review
"Nature, the most powerful force on Earth, is also the most mysterious. Once in a while, a poet with a scientist's eye gives us a view into that mystery. Colin Cheney, author of the debut collection Here Be Monsters, elucidates the world around us, the world we live in but treat as if it had little to do with us. Not so, these poems remind us. Not only do we inhabit the natural world, but it inhabits us. Consequences of this interdependence loom everywhere, from a trapped whale to the workings of cancer; to quote from 'Phaethon,' 'And though we are how cancer blooms / it's not as though making it through unaltered is the point' (p. 43). Nature's most tragic and destructive acts must be part of some long-term design, for in these poems, Nature is an intelligent force, rather than an arbitrary one. Here Be Monsters mixes images from the natural world with the dangers and fears facing men and women, creating its own weirdly beautiful geography." Erica Goss, Cerise Press (Read the entire Cerise Press review)
About the Author
"
Here Be Monsters is a desperate and magical exploration of the world as it is and as it lives in the imagination. Mythology meets evolution. History mingles, comfortably, with legend. The poems are lyrical and often classical, yet grounded and fresh...few writers can traverse such extensive territory as beautifully and seamlessly as he does in this debut collection." —
Oxford American“Nature is a serious character in Here Be Monsters, and these highly textured poems show us that disparate elements live side by side. Colin Cheney’s surprising, graceful leaps are never misleading or arbitrary. From poem to poem, line by line, classical and modern conceits converge throughout Here Be Monsters; the extraordinary touches the ordinary, and something changes in us.”—Yusef Komunyakaa
"As with the work of old geographers, the poems in Here Be Monsters abound in strange knowledge, which Cheney folds with assured craft into his lyrical/narrative mix, his language a beautifully balanced concoction—now simple and direct, now oblique and complex—of careful science, remote lore, and immediate feeling, all conjuring an atmosphere of skeptical wonder that the poet shares with us." —Eamon Grennan, author of Matter of Fact: Poems
"This is not the easiest poetry to write, but it is a joy to read and ponder as he turns wisdom into unforgettable, multidimensional journeys."--The Bloomsbury Review
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments xi
one.
An Explanation of Dark Matter 3
Transmutation Notebook B 4
Cosmography with Retriever 5
Considering John Mark Karr with Laura McPhee’s Photographs of the River of No Return 8
Poet in New York 9
Landfill Orchids 11
Dress Rehearsal for Bestiary 13
Lord God Bird 16
Our Blood Aligns Toward Something 18
two.
Here Be Monsters 21
Half Ourselves & Half Not 23
Watson and the Shark 25
How We Were Spared 31
Elegy for Elliott Smith 33
Of Lights That Go Before Men, and Follow Them Abroad in the Fields, by the Night Season 35
Infidelity 37
Decline of the North American Songbird 39
three.
Phaethon 43
Of Their Hideous Change 44
Ars Poetica with Vulture 46
Stabat Mater (Marie Curie’s Pitchblende) 49
Letter to James Hansen from Boulogne 51
Observatory 53
Tractor, Riveter 54
Or Is It Yours? 56
Hanging Garden 58
four.
Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds 65
When to Paint the Eyes In 69
Jitterbugs 71
Film & Ghost Film 73
Husbandry 75
See It Feelingly 76
Regulations on the Creation of New Species 77
Salt Marsh 78
Notes 79