In an American poetry landscape increasingly dominated by Instagramable verse or else steeped in present-day politics, C. Dale Young’s erotically charged and philosophical meditations feel like a refreshing return to lyric poetry’s origins. Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems (Four Way Books), Young’s sixth book of poetry, draws from three decades of work and covers a range of themes—art and self-portraiture, father-son relationships, the nature of pride and shame, ecstasy, misgiving, and more. But Young is most compelling when writing at the intersection of myth and the human body, as the book’s title suggests. In “Memento”—the opening poem in the collection—we find Young drawing from the wells of both storytelling and science:
The heart flickered within the chest
and generated heat, a tiny version of the sun
placed in the center of the chest by God.
And therein we find the first fabrication.
The second? That the heart was the seat
of a man’s soul. So strong was this belief
that Galen insisted the heart was
most important among organs, detailed how
tiny pores in the septum of the heart
allowed blood to seep from one side to the other.
So adamant was Galen that centuries later
clear-eyed Da Vinci and even Vesalius
chose to depict these pores despite the fact
neither one observed them. Sometimes
belief overrides truth…
What begins as a reflection on classical understandings of the heart quickly reveals itself to be a poem equally concerned with the nature of storytelling and myth-making. Despite Galen’s insistence on the heart’s supremacy during antiquity, or Da Vinci’s clear-eyed renderings many years later, the convictions held by these important men were based more on belief than on empirical evidence. Young corrects another historical account about the human body later in the poem—this time regarding the sacrificial procedures of the Aztecs:
…In their filthy journals,
the early missionaries recorded the way
Aztec priests ripped the hearts of men and women
out after cutting through their ribs in a single slice.
But this cannot be true. The ribs are a better armor
than many realize. The priests made a quick slice
from the umbilicus up and through the diaphragm. . .
Young, who practices medicine full-time in addition to his work as a poet and teacher, brings clinical experience and scientific knowledge to set the record straight. Yet, Poetry also has a say in this piece:
When a patient tells me her heart hurts, I know
she is not having physical pain. I have studied
figuration almost as much as I have studied the heart.
The heart longs, flutters like a bird, and even sings.
She says her heart hurts so much it brings tears
to her eyes. And I nod to acknowledge her truth.
What else can I do? I have not held my beloved
in my arms as he gasped and died. You see,
her husband had heart failure, fluid filling his chest…
Here, the poet and the doctor are in perfect balance. By the end of the poem, we understand that storytelling is itself a way of accessing painful emotional truths that might be inaccessible when using other, more “objective” methods. The stories we tell ourselves and others when grieving, even if they’re incompatible with the facts, often make better sense when viewed through a figurative lens.
A similar blending of body and myth appears in “As If from the Sea,” a dream erotic in which two men transform into a tree rooted in the sea’s shallow water:
. . .And while I am inside him, while we are kissing
and his arms are around my neck, it begins. Our hands
begin twisting together and, without warning, our chests
merge. We twist and fuse and then the dark bark
begins rising from our skin, now one, one body, and
one skin now covered in bark. And this is awesome
in the old-school sense of the word, you know, as
in awe-inspiring, filled with awe. And lo and behold,
we are a single tree standing in the shallows, our feet
now rooted in the sand as the leaves begin erupting
from our branches. That two men having sex
become a tree standing in the sea might seem odd,
but I read a lot of Ovid as a child. And well, it
affected me quite deeply. I’m just trying to be
honest here. I mean, I feel I owe you that.
But when I wake, I am covered in sweat, my heart
racing and panicked. I lie there feeling the motion
of the sea within me, my skin prickling, my skin
softened and salty as if from the sea.
The speaker’s voice is casually disarming here—“And this is awesome / in the old-school sense of the word.” At times the long lines and breezy register can feel overly conversational. The frequent authorial interjections in this poem (e.g., “I’m just trying to be / honest here”) are a bit excessive. Nevertheless, the lyric is properly mythic in its scope, and the poem succeeds as a modern interpretation of Ovid’s classic.
The other poems in Building the Perfect Animal are equally accessible and compelling, but occasionally one wonders what might be accomplished if Young were to compose under greater pressure by setting himself stricter formal constraints. In “The Falling Man,” a haunting villanelle where the author imagines the final moments of a man jumping from the World Trade Center after the September 11th attacks (likely drawing on Richard Drew’s infamous Associated Press photograph), the content finds its appropriate form:
The story is missing, so I fill it in—
it’s what a thinking person does to cope.
Without the details, only Death can win.
And so, the panic invariably set in,
the fires on the lower floors extinguishing hope.
The story is missing, so I fill it in.
Standing on a desk, he chose the lesser sin.
The floor, too hot to stand on, began to slope.
Without the details, only Death can win.
The shattered glass, the beams then caving in,
could anyone sane maintain a shred of hope?
The story is missing, so I fill it in.
I need to know the way his mind gave in
as smoke engulfed the room. Who could cope?
Without the details, only Death can win.
And out the window, like the smoke’s fin,
he flew. He plunged to something green like hope.
Without the details, only Death can win.
The story is missing, so I fill it in.
The two refrains in this poem evoke the compulsive nature of thought after experiencing trauma: the anxious need to narrate what can never be known in full, to make sense of an event too emotionally troubling for brute facts alone. Similarly, the dual rhyme scheme of the villanelle mirrors the speaker’s choice in the tower—burn or jump—and gives rise to some of the book’s most memorable lines. Like “Memento” and “As If from the Sea,” this poem also explores the relationship between storytelling and truth, only this time, the speaker fabricates the backstory rather than relying on received historical tropes. If Death wins in a world without details, then Young, in Building the Perfect Animal, leaves us with just enough to keep going forward.
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