paper • 72 pages • 17.95
ISBN: 978-1-961897-08-3
eISBN: 978-1-961897-09-0
September 2024 • Poetry
What if the Invader is Beautiful explores the ineffable yet primal connections between outer and inner landscapes — the impact that the natural world has on the psychological terrain of our interior lives. Through compressed, musical, and often deeply mysterious language, the poems enact the extreme outer limits of emotional experience. Often set in equally extreme natural settings, the poems ride the knife edge between beauty and terror — exploring concepts of the sublime, the spiritual power of the elements, the redemptive beauty of flora and fauna, and the psychological freedom of wide-open spaces — and illuminate how deepening our connection to these elements is ultimately what will save us from our human afflictions of separation, isolation, and fear.
Lucky
Dusk in the rift-valley now, saffroning.
Wild horses
reduced to spindle
skeletal trees—
The chestnut one barely an existence.
In the grimly lit adobe,
Amargosa
he holds me
like a storm-charm.
This is not
what I thought I would be.
Elliptical and interior, Louise Mathias’s What If the Invader is Beautiful is a book of pastoral like no other. Born of the West’s open spaces and the haunted towns that live on their edges, Mathias’s targeted lines hit sharply as arrows, and feel as decisive as a runoff creek melting over boulders in a cold mountain June. These poems offer an inoculating pain, a linguistic acupuncture that transforms fear by intensifying perception and awareness. Mathias has the vulnerability of Townes Van Zandt, the cunning of Emily Dickinson, and the storyteller’s gift of Cormac McCarthy—but her work is all her own. It feels clandestine, reckless and true, and it should be shared as abundantly as an open secret.
The exquisite and wholly original poems in Louise Mathias’s What if the Invader is Beautiful lead the reader through the violence and sorrow of what it is to be human. Through the Americana of motels and truck stops, the Southern California landscape of desert and ruin, its barren landscape glittering with the beauty and detritus of ghost flowers, lupine, lilies, ponies and “some kind of sister poppy.” Indeed, these poems wrestle with the question of what it is to be human. In “Fathoms,” the poem’s speaker is the recipient of a “once-husband’s” command to “Act like a human,” as if they had somehow slid beneath the level of human, down to that of animal. Which is to say, the poems also ask what it is to be reduced to animal. The poems, submerged as they are in flora and fauna and the wondrous presence of animals, show us also what it might mean to return to our original second nature—nature, itself. We are all animals. Or, as Mayakovsky writes, “We are all of us horses, to some extent!” What makes us human is that we are also animal. It is when we make an attempt at bridging the two that human freedom is found, as Mathias writes in “Larrea:” “Moved the jackrabbit / from the road, laid her under / a bush. Land of little / shade, we do what we can.”
Louise Mathias takes poetry into frightening places. Or is it the other way round? “No word / is ever safe” is a truth these words, sharp as knives, can vouch for. They accept that art may be violence “as a peony / is violence.” (I think “peony” is a word that would like to turn into “poem.”) Let these poems pierce you with their truth and beauty.
A stunning, wandering connector between the “invader” of the forest (the title referencing an invasive tree) and the human invader….the book refuses flash and motif-leaning, prioritizing an understated elegance.