On cleaning days, my mother used to toss my brother and I out of the house. We weren’t allowed to return until evening, when the carpets would be groomed into neat rows by the vacuum, and the hardwood floors smelled like Pinesol. One such day, banished to the outdoors, my brother and I decided to go exploring. We approached the edge of our property, where the grass grew long then disappeared into a pine forest. My brother stopped me and pointed. At first, I didn’t see it, but then I saw nothing else: the body of a deer, a doe, lay prone in front of us. There, in the knee-high grass, I saw the stillness in the deer’s eye, and everything around it, alive.
I couldn’t have been older than five. This was back when we lived in Columbus, Georgia, “deep south Georgia,” I tell people who may not know that there is a difference between Atlanta, its suburbs, and the rest of the state. Whenever I think of the three short years we spent in Columbus, the phrase “Southern Gothic” swims to the surface of my mind.
The poems in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s collection, Song, share that same Gothic vibe. In literature, the gothic style can be generally described as writing that employs dark and picturesque scenery, startling and melodramatic devices, and an overall atmosphere of mystery, fear and dread. Kelly’s collection opens with an image straight out of the Gothic handbook, “Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree. / All night it hung there and sang.”
The poem tells the story of a girl’s pet goat slaughtered by a group of boys, who then string the animal’s head up in a tree. The head of the goat sings a song that follows the boys throughout their lives. The poem has the flavor of a fable, or something out of Edgar Allen Poe; the song the goat sings may be a metaphor for the guilt or regret that follows the boys throughout their life, or it may just be what it is—a goat head, singing.
In “The Column of Mercury Recording the Temperature of Night,” Peegan crosses further into the mists of the supernatural. Here, sleeplessness is personified, “No Sleep prowling like a caged animal,” We walk with this phantom into the ever-creepier valley of the insomniac, where “the melancholy grows steeper,” though the land is flat, and “the train slows in the night,” though there is no station.” A hospital is characterized as “A garden / Full of sleep eaters and the audience they have captured: / The ones they hurt as they eat the heart’s carved tablets.” Later she asks, “Is it hate / does this? Oh yes, probably. But how can we guess at it?”
The Gothic movement in literature arose at a time when scientific reason was gaining momentum; it was a response for all that remained still unknown and unaccounted for in the world, and within the human mind. When my brother and I saw the dead deer, we went running back to the house and screamed for our mother to let us in. She did not. She told us to stay away from the dead thing, and that it could not get us. But the image of the deer has followed me my whole life. It rose again in Kelly’s poem, “Dead Doe.” She seems to be describing almost the same event—children eying a dead deer, a mother trying to alleviate their worries,
“the doe lay dead: she could
do nothing:
the dead can mother nothing…nothing
but our sight: they mother that, whether they will or no”
The speaker in Kelly’s poem struggles to process the image of the dead doe—revising it again and again, in a seeming attempt to integrate the complexity and horror of death with the beauty, the liveliness, of life. Death is something that can be explained scientifically, but it is not known or felt scientifically, especially through the eyes of a child.d what comes after still remains a mystery to us. So, in “Dead Doe,” what happens instead is a flight of the imagination—the image of the inert, dead doe is transformed into two swans fighting, which in turn begin to represent the soul of the deer. Now, the speaker declares, “we are not afraid / though we should be,” and closes the poem with a leap of faith in the face of death, “Child. We are done for / in the most remarkable ways.”
The image of the dead doe recurs again and again throughout Song, along with other images—gardens, birds, statues, and destructive boys. The repetition begins to produce a haunting, hypnotic effect, loading the images with symbolism that, because it is never overt, causes the poems to become increasingly surreal, taking on a mythic quality. These images culminate in the penultimate poem in the collection, “All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer,” which contains both doe and swan. She circles from a bank robbery, to a fatal lightning strike, to the mean swan at the pond on Wasigan road, back to the bus stop, where the body of the doe lies in sight of the children. In the final lines, the speaker imagines the doe running toward its death, “The heart flying into the arms of the one that will kill her.” In a single line, Kelly calls to mind a number of Gothic tropes: Fear, omens, doomed romance, and a damsel in distress. But she locates the Gothic in the quotidian—among children waiting for the bus stop. It’s this juxtaposition that, to my mind, makes her poems so visceral. The Gothic doesn’t just live in old haunted mansions, it springs from the dark of our imaginations reacting to the banal realities of life–realities we can’t fully explain.
Laura Linart 