Bone Strings, Anne Coray (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2005) -- reviewed by Katie Kingston

Anne Coray’s poems in Bone Strings emanate an intuitive sense of the Alaskan wilderness where she grew up. As one who is intimate with landscape, she is able to bypass the tendency to conceive wilderness as a pristine, magical presence. Instead, through her poems, she meanders the fractured line between harshness and beauty. She readily confronts the odds of survival and exposes the reader to a certain reality not only about the wilderness of nature but also about the wilderness of self.

Her poems are attentive to the plight of wildlife as civilization encroaches. The walrus, the moose, the ptarmigan, the wolves are just some of the presences with which she interrelates in her poems, and even if they fail in their individual struggle to survive, she draws on the continuity of nature as an active setting to death’s inevitable presence. In the poem “Elegy for Four Wolves Killed by a Neighbor Last December,” the opening line, which lends the book its title, reverberates with this sense of a cosmic presence lending continuity to a harsh reality:

The north wind strums its bone strings.
Ravens too make their music, plucking
the last fish scraps from the ice.

Coray’s attention to nature goes beyond a sense of place. Her most genuine lines reveal how nature transforms the self. In the same poem, she continues, “And I am still worrying transitions, / stuck in a brutal month of blood and skins.” This sense of transition permeates her poems. Another example is found in “The Unexalted,” where she leads us again to the interaction of landscape with self: “The land / only collects our grief; the stars release it, untraceable, anonymous.”

Throughout her poems, her treatment of the human presence is as fragile as that of wildlife. She writes of a father who died in flight, of a mother waiting. In the poem “Alaskan,” she opens with the line, “Here, death is common by air,” acknowledging in her steady voice what one accepts from living on the edge of wilderness. Yet, even in this knowledge, she doesn’t give over to the finality of death, but instead she gives the reader a sense of its place in the cosmic world:

So they are given over:

flying a Cook Inlet’s coast
or a mountain pass,
there are little puffs
that make the airplane shudder,
breaths of the invisible
reclaiming their position
in the sun-washed sky.

Even though these poems are anchored in the Alaskan landscapes, they have a tendency to appeal to the universal meandering in each of us. In the same poem, she draws up images as universal as Penelope waiting for the return of Ulysses, only here the women do not wait for return from the sea, but from the sky:

Flights in fog and overloaded planes
take many, and widows lie
in star-laced beds,
the names of the unburied
soft upon their lips.

In her seamless transitions, Coray’s references to language infiltrate the imagery of external and internal landscapes. In the poem “Kinships,” she gives us, in her own words, the “landscape of tongue.” Here again, she underscores that fine line between beauty and harshness by giving wilderness its own voice, “the river’s throat learning / its earliest course,” leading us to “the world awash with voice,” which is as good a description as any for her book—a world awash with voice.