A novel of poetic beauty

Sometimes prose is poetry. As National Poetry Month kicks off, I want to shout out THE WOOD WIFE, a book that’s new to me but has been around since 1996 and won the Mythopoeic Award.
I ordered it after reading a good review and because I’m a fan of Terri Windling’s skill as an editor of many fantasy and horror anthologies. One of my all-time favorites is THE FAERY REEL, which she co-edited with Ellen Datlow.
I haven’t finished reading THE WOOD WIFE (about 2/3 inhaled), so this isn’t a review. It’s more of a love letter to a story that keeps fascinating me and to words that make me pause and sigh.
And because it’s about a fictional poet, Davis Cooper, and filled with snippets of his poetry, it’s perfect for National Poetry Month. The book isn’t a verse novel it’s just filled with poetic language, pieces of Cooper’s poems and musings on arts of all kinds.
The hills call in a tongue

I can not speak, a constant murmuring,

calling the rain from my dry bones,

and syllables from the marrow.—THE WOOD WIFE, Davis Cooper

This story is as elusive as its shapeshifter characters, making you question what is real, what is imagination. But it is solidly set. Windling, who is also an artist, paints the scenes with vivid words that carry the reader to the wild desert and hills surrounding Tucson:
She turned slowly, and saw the great white stag pick its way up the rocks of the creek. His eyes were black as a starless night. His hide was velvet, his horns were ivory, he was made of more than flesh and bones. He gathered the dying light of the sky into his being, like a radiant star.

The protagonist, Maggie Black, is forty and a respected poet herself who inherits Davis’s house after his strange death, which appears to be murder. She goes to check it out, not intending to stay but interested in the mystery and any writings he may have left behind. She finds herself enchanted by the desert and its magic and drawn into something beyond time and space.

The Drowned Girl leaves wet footprints,

plaits her hair with pond weed, fingers

white as milk, as death, as loneliness,

upon root, wood, black stone…--THE WOOD WIFE, Davis Cooper

At one point Maggie is surprised to figure out that she’d always seen Davis’s poems as set in England where he was born. But instead of lush, green woods, she realized he was writing about the desert landscape. Her new friend, Fox, responds: “What does it matter whose head those images came from? ‘Poetry is a conversation not a monologue,’ Fox quoted Cooper in a passable English accent. “A writer can only put the words on paper; the vision has to come from the reader, right? It’s language, not paint, not film. That’s the beauty of it to me.”

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Anyone want to have a conversation on poetry, on this book, on the beauty of language?