A Modern Wunderkammer

Constance Hunting. Natural Things: Collected Poems 1969-1998. National Poetry Foundation 1999. 228 pp. $19.95 Constance Hunting is a connoisseur of things both natural and fabricated, with a knack for choosing and framing her treasures, some of which are idiosyncratic, even bizarre: Rouge ruffles Patagonian decor papier-mache glyptodonts rocks thoroacuses guanacoes manadoroes Sultans mandarins (from Notes from Voyage) As a curator, she invites reader to tour her latest, intensely theatrical, exhibition. objects she lovingly catalogues in her poems display a baroque copiousness that gives impression she has plenty more where that came from, if only she had enough paper and her readers enough patience. scale she prefers, like an opera composer's or a film director's, requires certain sound effects, tones of voice, costumes, props. Some of raw material for this stagecraft is conventional, even tawdry. long poem Easter in New England, for example, puts together a series of vignettes, each featuring a character in a small town reeling from a murder. Hunting makes us privy to physical, verbal, and mental meanderings of such Down East types The Recluse, The Caretaker, and The Witness, but with a deft control of syntax and irony and a seductive wit, she ensures that their New England Gothic tics rise above cliche: Sunday morning and bell sweet wound of sound steeple visible floating in thin blue mist like a strangler's scarf at God's white gloriously vulnerable throat. (from The Recusant) poem springs away from its dry statement of time to a line with two self-conscious rhymes, first a sight rhyme, second a near rhyme within an inversion: the sweet wound of sound steeple visible. coiled energy sets in motion next startling image: strangulation of God by a murderous cloud, in what is perhaps a recusant's daydream. Murder is news, but Death is old hat in this town. The Carpenter, whose specialty is coffins, takes an unnamed visitor down some rickety stairs (mind your footing / that tread's loose again), to see his collection of coffin carvings and family mourning scenes. He is proud of them and refuses to sell although you yearners don't give up: follow me and I'll raise blind for your edification gaze to your heart's disease light falls best from this north window excuse dust living way I do I'm garrulous such company I'm used to being lately most of my family had black hair miles of it in these pictures hair stitched on linen you'll observe these subjects are well known wreaths urns tombs willows weeping females (I own a fondness for Magdalene) enough grief to turn a windmill often I cry out loud at them gone under and me tramping earth Hunting uses abrupt caesuras to mime gaps of uneasy speech. With his nervous jokes and derailed train of thought, this eccentric speaker seems at once absent-minded and caustic (gaze / to your heart's disease), vacillating between cool dismissal and maudlin confession. verb own, for instance, suggests an ironic attitude toward collector's desire to possess, not merely to admire, sexy saint of renunciation. stop-and-start rhythm often isolates a line from those above and below, bringing it into sharp and uncanny focus: as I'm used to being lately dead points out morbidity of speaker himself, not only his company. An antique yearner who won't give up, Hunting roots through shards of past doggedly any archeologist or bowerbird. Certainly workings of museum fascinate her. American Notes, Treasures, and Album-Leaf Stanzas contain numbered sections that could be captions or stops on an audio tour. …