I did not expect any gifts the day I graduated from my doctoral program. Finishing graduate school is not like finishing undergraduate study or high school, those rites of passage that modern American culture recognizes as the liminal space between youth and adulthood; in graduate school, one is already an adult, even by the arrested standards common to millennials like myself; and if like me, the graduate is not headed into a professorship, the view from one side of the threshold is not so different from the other. Mainly I was thinking about how graduating meant I would lose my job, my health insurance, and most of my friends – a bittersweet occasion, at best.
At lunch before the ceremony, a family friend, someone who had gone to sabbats with my parents when I was younger, handed me a small book, not much larger than the palm of my hand. The pages were austere and cream-colored, and the cover had a rough and pleasant texture. On it was a silhouette of a bear, rampant, with a vine growing out of its mouth, and a title: “Sometimes a Wild God, a poem by Tom Hirons with illustrations by Rima Staines.”
Sometimes a Wild God has developed a following since it was first published in 2012, though I had not heard of it before my friend slipped the book into my hands in 2018. It is a poem about an encounter with a horned god, a primal being of the wilderness, a being who, the first lines of the poem tell us, “does not know the ways of porcelain, of fork and mustard and silver.” The wild god invites himself into the reader’s kitchen and brings to mind all the alienation that holds us back from the ecstatic frenzy of the living world. “I was too busy,” we say when the wild god asks us why we left him to die; we say this just as the wild god points out that we are bleeding heavily, and have been, possibly since we were born. “There is a bear in the wound,” we are told, in language so spare that there is nowhere to hide from the strange truth of the image.
The other day I received a package of other tiny books by Tom Hirons, among them a new edition of Sometimes a Wild God (unfortunately missing most of Rima Staines’s artwork), the poetry collection Falconer’s Joy, and the prose volumes Nettle-eater and Black Hat, all published through Hedgespoken Press, Hirons and Staines’ publishing imprint. None are more than 28 pages long, each one staple-bound and clad in the same kind of cover as Wild God, a joy to touch. Each one notes that it is printed on recycled paper by a workers’ cooperative in England, which I appreciated, a further sign of how the form of the books had been stitched together with their message. The same day they arrived I sat and inhaled them all in a row.
A moor in Derbyshire, UK [Michael Gaida, Pixabay]
Two of the pieces remain fixed in my head, several weeks later. The first is Nettle-eater, which reads like a surrealist take on the Henry David Thoreau trope1 of going to the woods to “front only the essential facts of life.” The narrator of Nettle-eater opens bombastically: “You know the call. All your books speak of it. If I differ from you, it is only in this: When the call came, I heeded it.” The call, written like words from a burning bush, commands him thus: “Go to the moor. Live wild there. Eat only nettles for one year.” It does not take long for the nettle-eater to become, more than just a hermit, a true woodwose haunting the fens.
I cannot say how other readers would respond, but there is something undeniable in these words as well; I know I feel that call often, that urge to escape from all the trappings (that is, traps) of civilization and become a starstruck hermit wandering the fens somewhere in the Missouri lowlands from whence my family came. The narrator of Nettle-eater clearly does not maintain the cool wisdom and rationality of writers like Thoreau, Annie Dillard, or Gary Snyder; his quest is a mad one, but then, perhaps our delusions are just as bad as his, or worse. “Look at that world beyond your door,” the narrator says near the end of the book. “Your life is on fire. Run!”
A promotional image for Tom Hirons’s Falconer’s Joy, with artwork of a falcon in flight by Rima Staines [Hedgespoken Press]
The mania of Nettle-eater, however, is balanced by a poem in Falconer’s Joy, “Worship of Place,” a meditation on the natural world as a temple to itself. As I look back on my own development as a Pagan over the past decade, I notice that I care less about which authors I promote or signifiers I adopt that define my experience, so much as it is my relationship to particular places. So when I read verses like this, I find myself nodding unbidden, my eyes filled with the images of places that have evoked this kind of awe:
The priestess of this shrine bars entry to no one;
She greets me in silence and in silence I depart.
Everyone is welcomed in for worship;
The congregation of all creatures give praise
And offerings to the hallowed sanctuary;
The object of their veneration is the world itself.
Some of Tom Hirons’s work can be read on the internet, but I think something is lost in the experience of reading these works on screens. When I taught literature surveys, back before I graduated, I liked to show my students how the works they read in their anthologies were originally presented. How sanitized does William Blake seem when divorced from the idiosyncrasies of his printing technique? How much mystery does Beowulf lose without seeing a picture of that singed manuscript, so close to being lost forever? How much have we lost in our readings of James Baldwin when we forget that The Fire Next Time was originally presented next to ads for diamonds and luxury cars in the pages of The New Yorker?
So it is with these tiny books, whose messages of the yearning call of the wilderness come across so much more vividly in these beautiful, tactile books. Their size magnifies the power of their ideas and their imagery, inviting the reader to for once to concentrate on the thing in front of them. I cannot wait for a warm spring morning when I can sit out in the woods and read them again.
1. Readers are not allowed to make wisecracks in the comments about Thoreau or his laundry without having first read this essay by Rebecca Solnit.↩
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