MP Review
Dennis Patrick Slattery, Twisted Sky
Winchester Canyon Press
$14.95, 125 pages
ISBN 978097061490
cover and Back Cover of Book

reviewer: Cheryl Snell
Bio for Cheryl Snell

A printable page

A scholar in depth psychology, literature, mythology, and literary theory, Dennis Patrick Slattery writes from the point-of-view that all minds are embedded in myth-making. The term mythopoeses refers to the retelling of old stories, opening them to new cultural and personal meanings. In this book, Nicomedes, St. Anthony, and the Theban legion appear with stories of struggle and transformation that reach across the cultural divide; but the author also uses the sea’s “liquid chaos,” dawn at Big Sur, the structure of trees to show how we fit into the scheme of things, and how we view our relationships.

The cover of Twisted Sky shows one of those trees, gnarled against a clear blue sky, and the poem “Tree Skin” has the narrator warning a man about to saw down the tree: “If you must wound the tree, first/touch its skin with your palm face out./pause for a moment…try…to discover where/your flesh ends and its skin begins.” The central metaphor transforms the subject. “Your feet and toes have already begun to bud/themselves into the loam beneath you//”

To articulate the psyche’s poetic nature is one of Slattery’s main interests, and the psyche of nature “is good to think with,” observes Patricia Cox Miller in her preface to The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion. (This work is cited at length by Stephanie Pope in her foreward to Slattery’s book.) Nature and wildness stand in for the irrational in the soul, and “an image sign-system infused with religious divinity and human passion.”  The comparisons in “Mountain Lion” underscore this, man and animal momentarily merged; or in “Bear’s Brown Study” in which the wakening animal “--stirs in loose skin, feeling the fine form of a man/slip through his brown ruggy dream/”

The power of transformation and renewal is further illustrated in “Burying Debris.” A tree springs from the narrator’s divorce decree buried in a back yard, “…full of/ Blue leaves that hung like court/ Briefs almost to the ground,/” “Rubble in Eden” where flowers flow out “like blood,” absorbing “all the dust and/dismay surrounding their motion;” also shows the violence in change. “… they die…/each is replaced with a hundred more…// 

Metaphor is the mother tongue of mythos, says the author. In the introduction of his book, Slattery characterizes poetry as “the liquid spring of our being,” nourishing us through arid outer lives. Jung says that all psychological problems are spiritual problems. As the psyche generates mythico-religious symbolism, where do we invest our spirituality?  The character in “Kiva” meditates on a beetle entering “A sacred square cut into the round/ Wall where, a tribal elder tells me/Earlier, is the origin of his people, /a cavity of first creation.// …Kiva born from land no/longer theirs to call home//”

What else happens under a twisted sky? An idea of beauty may fall to earth from above, or an image may rise up from beneath.  In the book’s final poem, Divine In(ter)vention, the narrator watches the sky and sees “/the ice chip/floating toward the heart, full of intent./…how could chaos appear so neatly ordered,/even prim in such a twisted sky?//”

“Ideas die with a struggle and, in doing so, live a long life in the soul,” the author observes. Despite some over-writing and a use of sonics that can overtake sense, the ideas in this volume are provocative, and consistent with the author’s teachings, as I understand them. Dennis Patrick Slattery is Core Faculty, Mythological Studies Program at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. This is his third volume of poetry. 

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James Hillman. A Terrible Love of War. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. ISBN 1-59420-011-4. 256 pp. cloth. (PDF document)

Jonathan Shay. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. Foreword by Senators John McCain and Max Cleland. New York: Scribner, 2002. 329pp. $25.00 cloth. (PDF document)

Thomas Moore. Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals. New York: Gotham Books, 2004. (Forthcoming). (PDF document)

Michael Vannoy Adams. The Mythological Unconscious. New York: Karnac, 2001. (PDF document)

Reprinted from Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture 71 (2004): 223-227.

David Kidner. Nature and PsycheRadical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001. (PDF document)

Jack Miles. Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2001. (PDF document)

Robert Sardello. Freeing the Soul From Fear. New York: Riverside Books, 2001. (PDF document)