How to Unveil an Essential Wildness: Review of Claudine Nash’s The Wild Essential
by Laurette Folk
The majority of us live out our lives in spaces of conformity, and while this keeps us safe and productive, we must admit there is a wildness inside us, an ecstatic, creative, daring self that wants to devour life whole. It is with this self that Claudine Nash seeks to connect in her book The Wild Essential.
While our conforming selves are small and relatively insignificant, the wild self is “an unyielding mountain…an imposing, impossible peak” as Nash states in her poem “You Are a Mountain.” The wild self has power, confidence, and is in direct contrast to the conforming self that is stricken with doubts and a monkey mind that “[flings] old fears around/with those wasted/bits of fruit.” The doubting, day-to-day self can be depressed, “feel like a drought, yes,” Nash claims in her poem “A Beautiful Rain,” but she believes “[t]here is a pool in your/ heart, deep and sustaining./ Nothing has withered/no one will drown here.” This wild self runs deeper than we think and has great emotional capacity.
Along with doubts and depressions, the conforming self is restricted by labels. If you “unname” her and “peel away these labels/ one letter at a time,” as Nash says in her eponymous poem, she will “grow/ [her] own meaning.” You have thus begun the process of unveiling the wild essential.
These poems are both inspirational and didactic and reinstate a faith that has been long lost in the stresses and vicissitudes of daily life. In “Morning Blend,” Nash tells us to “sit back and savor/ [our] French roast with/clear conscience,/ the morning will manage just fine with or without/ your assistance.” Herein lies the paradox of the conforming, everyday self—often a female self who believes only she can do her mothering, her job, in the ways they need to be done, and do it alone. The creative, wild essential seems lost to us in our daily lives of drudgery, but this is false. We only need to “[l]ean forward and/ draw on the past”; we were once that person and we can become her again, we can “slip back seamlessly/into [the] loop. See how/ its arc suits [us],/ how it fits and fills/ the gaps and breaks,/ all the empty inches/ within [us].” And if this doesn’t work, we could send the self a message “over and again,/ on a rolled slip affixed to [a] tired carrier pigeon/ or through the mint/ leaves that swirl/ through [a] cup.”
Give the wild essential self a region, as Nash advises in “Why I received a Needs Improvement on My Last Employee Evaluation,” (a telling title that indicates a conforming self is becoming less engaged in her daily work). In this poem, the wild essential starts to peek through in the morning while walking the dog. It needs solitude and, of course, the natural world: an “icy stillness/ of [a] moonless/field.” Here one need not look into cell phone for a “divine text/ wrapped/ in a glowing/ bow of light/ that says ‘Child,/ all these/fraying ends/ will someday tie together’” as stated in the apt poem “I Keep Checking My Samsung Galaxy for Meaning.”
Some of these poems can serve as mantras, others should be tucked between the mattress, a cache for the tired, hopeless, perhaps depressed self who is seeking more from this life, and needing the coaxing to get it.
Laurette Folk is Senior Editor of The Compassion Anthology. Claudine Nash’s The Wild Essential is available from Kelsay Books.
by Laurette Folk
The majority of us live out our lives in spaces of conformity, and while this keeps us safe and productive, we must admit there is a wildness inside us, an ecstatic, creative, daring self that wants to devour life whole. It is with this self that Claudine Nash seeks to connect in her book The Wild Essential.
While our conforming selves are small and relatively insignificant, the wild self is “an unyielding mountain…an imposing, impossible peak” as Nash states in her poem “You Are a Mountain.” The wild self has power, confidence, and is in direct contrast to the conforming self that is stricken with doubts and a monkey mind that “[flings] old fears around/with those wasted/bits of fruit.” The doubting, day-to-day self can be depressed, “feel like a drought, yes,” Nash claims in her poem “A Beautiful Rain,” but she believes “[t]here is a pool in your/ heart, deep and sustaining./ Nothing has withered/no one will drown here.” This wild self runs deeper than we think and has great emotional capacity.
Along with doubts and depressions, the conforming self is restricted by labels. If you “unname” her and “peel away these labels/ one letter at a time,” as Nash says in her eponymous poem, she will “grow/ [her] own meaning.” You have thus begun the process of unveiling the wild essential.
These poems are both inspirational and didactic and reinstate a faith that has been long lost in the stresses and vicissitudes of daily life. In “Morning Blend,” Nash tells us to “sit back and savor/ [our] French roast with/clear conscience,/ the morning will manage just fine with or without/ your assistance.” Herein lies the paradox of the conforming, everyday self—often a female self who believes only she can do her mothering, her job, in the ways they need to be done, and do it alone. The creative, wild essential seems lost to us in our daily lives of drudgery, but this is false. We only need to “[l]ean forward and/ draw on the past”; we were once that person and we can become her again, we can “slip back seamlessly/into [the] loop. See how/ its arc suits [us],/ how it fits and fills/ the gaps and breaks,/ all the empty inches/ within [us].” And if this doesn’t work, we could send the self a message “over and again,/ on a rolled slip affixed to [a] tired carrier pigeon/ or through the mint/ leaves that swirl/ through [a] cup.”
Give the wild essential self a region, as Nash advises in “Why I received a Needs Improvement on My Last Employee Evaluation,” (a telling title that indicates a conforming self is becoming less engaged in her daily work). In this poem, the wild essential starts to peek through in the morning while walking the dog. It needs solitude and, of course, the natural world: an “icy stillness/ of [a] moonless/field.” Here one need not look into cell phone for a “divine text/ wrapped/ in a glowing/ bow of light/ that says ‘Child,/ all these/fraying ends/ will someday tie together’” as stated in the apt poem “I Keep Checking My Samsung Galaxy for Meaning.”
Some of these poems can serve as mantras, others should be tucked between the mattress, a cache for the tired, hopeless, perhaps depressed self who is seeking more from this life, and needing the coaxing to get it.
Laurette Folk is Senior Editor of The Compassion Anthology. Claudine Nash’s The Wild Essential is available from Kelsay Books.
