Emerging from the busy onrush of today's published verse, the eager torrent of language that comprises contemporary poetry in the US, Tarantula Season, a first collection by the New Mexico poet DB Jonas, solicits attention to quieter pleasures, to the increasingly exotic virtues of exacting craft and contemplation. From its position outside the mainstream narratives of our confessional age, Tarantula Season draws us into the complex interweavings of its lyrical web and, managing somehow to change the conversation that dominates today's welter of media spaces, offers the possibility of new narratives concerning creativity, thinking, nature, and life itself.
Comprising nearly 200 pages of verse, this volume transports the reader across an astonishing range of natural landscapes, cultural environments and historical timeframes, all of which operate as "dislocations," to use this poet's vocabulary, obliging us to see our own lives differently, open ourselves to diversity, and understand our identities not as stable, isolate foundations, but as exposures and vulnerabilities, flesh-and-blood responses to the solicitations of the incommensurate, to the other of ourselves, to all that lies outside our skin.
Tarantula Season's poems are grouped under five rubrics. Starting with Questions of Place, poems that examine the mysterious rapport of the individual and its environment, a rapport both fugitive and formative, we are led by a slender narrative thread into the interior of the collection. Under a Hurrying Sky, the second grouping, explores the dynamics of uprootedness, the perpetual motion of living creatures, the inescapable significance of our being always on the way. Intimations, the poems at the heart of this collection, contemplate the paradoxes of our interiority, the presumably private contours of individual identity, as habitations of an alterity, the haunting evidence of a foreignness that has taken up residence in what should be the inviolate precincts of the self. While Vivid Vicinities, the fourth grouping in this book, transports us into the realm of visual and musical expression, Parts of Speech, its final group of poems, examines the curious recursive practice of composition in rhythmic and musical speech, the irresistible cadences and compulsions of journeying and song.
Each lyric in this rich volume presents us with evidence, at once familiar and enigmatic, of the way our lived experience escapes the facile categories of conventional logic. As readers, we emerge from the winding galleries of this collection blinking into the sunlight, perhaps a little less certain of our footing, but somehow less concerned about uncertainty. We just may find that we emerge somehow changed.