Naming the Beasts by Elizabeth Morton
“I am wolf, if only because I’m not fit to be anyone else.”
In literature, in myth and in origin stories, beasts are everywhere. They are the animals hiding in forests; they are the birds who darken the sky with carrion wings; they are also the fairy tale figures who are so self-conscious of their difference that they almost die unloved and alone. Aotearoa/New Zealand poet, Elizabeth Morton’s poetry collection Naming the Beasts (2022) speaks to all these levels of the animalistic. Her poems are wildly lonely. That is their beauty; it is also their terror.
Shortlisted and longlisted for two different national poetry prizes in her home country, Morton, with a gentle bucking of propriety, questions socially ascribed symbols and stories in her poetry. For instance, in her poem ‘Kuroko’ she imaginatively asks herself, “what rib did you come from?” Where does a writer start and a woman end? When does a poet become a success? What makes us who we are? And why are certain stories deemed more important than others? Do poet and reader come from Adam as the Biblical story tells? Or is questioning the rib’s origin a sign of humanity’s desperate desire to own the world through the process of naming?
It is this questioning – and its links to such themes as life, death, birth and rebirth – that is at the heart of Morton’s poetry. Morton doesn’t just go there; she goes deep. In ‘Widdershins’ she writes, “wolf rhymes with nothing, holds the giddiness of galaxies / by the scruff of their necks.” Later in the poem Morton writes of looking for “the lily neck of something gentler.” Morton’s poetry is all about contrast, in both theme and imagery. In ‘Widdershins’ Morton’s concept of a wild violence tempered by a sense of measured meekness is expressed using a botanical reference in direct contrast with the rougher sense of a wild beast. That the neck is mentioned twice is significant. Its repetition gives a vulnerable air of physicality and a bodily structure to a poem that is about the tension between the tamed and the wild.
Morton’s poetry, although skilfully crafted, is also rarely purely pretty – and that is its power. This is poetry not just with meat; it also comes bloody. Where it really shines is when she makes the reader look at an ugly thing with new eyes, or endows a pretty thing with an air of the macabre. In ‘Mower’ she tells us how “my father peels back the honey suckle from the soft brains of hydrangeas.” Morton’s work juxtaposes ugliness with stereotypical beauty to make us see the world in a different way.
With a different touch, Mortin states in ‘We write what we know when we run out of things that we don’t:’ “I will be the cow in somebody’s poem. In another, I will be the gun.” Here, figures are written about in the stark clarity of life and death, subject and object, creature and weapon. In this poem, the unashamed violence when it comes to animal slaughter makes her work vividly vicious in how life and death go hand in hand.
The animal world is touched by both beauty and brutality. In Naming the Beasts, Morton explores the concept of belonging to a wider ecosystem where man is both hunter and hunted. “I am wolf, if only because I’m not fit to be anyone else,” she states in ‘Metaphors are for pussies.’ Humans are not so much tracked by literal animals but rather by the beasts of our own thoughts that bite and claw. For example, in ‘What we wish,’ she has a “little brain saying knock knock so soft nobody knew the etiquette of answering.” These are the kinds of thought-beasts that can leave us breathless with the hugeness of what we know but are fearful of saying.
Morton’s poetry reminds us of where we come from: this is often an uncomfortable truth because she seems to know intimately what we’re trying to escape from. It is in this space of discomfort that her poetry really comes into its own. Naming the Beasts targets big questions about what it is to be alive, and then hunts down the answers in the space between the tamed and the wild where there are often more questions to be found. This can make for slightly frustrating reading, but the luscious language and rich imagery makes up for it, leaving the reader salivating for more.
With an audience of animals who can read, Morton’s poems touch both the beauty and the beast within us. Her collection successfully marries the two to create a world that is both gory and gorgeous. The animalism reminds the reader of our origins: if you take everything else away, we too are beasts.
Stella Peg Carruthers is an emerging writer from Aotearoa New Zealand. Shortlisted for several short story competitions, she has also had works of poetry and creative non-fiction published. She works in an academic library.