Review by Tyler R. Tichelaar
In these pages, we might say the mystery of Bigfoot is solved, and yet, in all of his many aspects, as revealed by former two-time UP Poet Laureate Martin Achatz in this book, he becomes more enigmatic than ever. If you think you know Bigfoot, think again, because it is doubtful that anyone has lived with Bigfoot as intimately as this author.
A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders is Martin Achatz’s collection of poetry about Bigfoot and a few other topics. The book is divided into two sections, “Tall and Hairy” and “Furred and Winged and Scaled,” plus a “Coda” section with four poems. In all, sixty poems fill this eighty-five-page collection. The first section is all poems about Bigfoot, the second section is about the Other Wonders, and then Bigfoot is returned to in the “Coda.”
The Bigfoot poems were my favorites because they are so delightfully surprising and humorous so I’ll primarily focus on them. Perhaps the seminal poem in the volume is “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Bigfoot,” which owes its inspiration to Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Just to give a taste of the humor, I’ll quote the eleventh way:
Bigfoot and a Syrian refugee
Walk into a bar.
The bartender looks
at the refugee, says,
“We don’t serve your kind in here,”
Breaking Bigfoot’s immigrant heart.
Similar poems play off other famous poems, each presenting us with new ways to look at Bigfoot. We learn Bigfoot’s history beginning with “The Eighth Day, A Bigfoot Creation Story” in which God creates Bigfoot after he wakes from his nap. Bigfoot is composed of “magma and ice shag, the roar of asteroid dust” and “milk from the woman.” In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Bigfoot,” we learn of moments in Bigfoot’s early life, how “it’s easy to mistake/Bigfoot for God/strolling through Eden,” and that Bigfoot searched for the ark before the flood.
We get a sense of Bigfoot’s personality in poems like “Bigfoot Meets a Homeless Man at Presque Isle.” Here, Bigfoot kills a squirrel and gives it to the homeless man “To remind the man that the world still loves him.” In other poems we learn about Bigfoot’s relationship with the Loch Ness Monster and we meet Lady Bigfoot. In “Bigfoot Takes His Wife to Mount Rushmore for Their Honeymoon,” the two Bigfoots make love before the presidents’ stone faces, which watch them like “bachelor uncles and maiden aunts do at weddings,” and we are told that the Bigfoots are “spacious sky, amber wave, beautiful pilgrim feet.” In short, they are America the Beautiful.
In “Bigfoot Goes Trick-or-Treating,” Bigfoot collects Twix bars since people assume he’s in costume. In “Bigfoot’s New Year’s Resolutions,” he wants to gain weight, exercise less, eat more meat, care less, and travel less. In “Bigfoot and Charlie Parker—Mardi Gras, 1950,” he joins in the Mardi Gras parade, while “not/caring who saw his missing link/ass parading all the way down/to Bourbon Street.”
What I especially loved about all these Bigfoot poems is that while each poem stands alone, their cumulative effect is that Bigfoot, for both Martin Achatz and his ideal reader, becomes the missing link, not to human existence in the biological or physical sense, but in a metaphysical sense. He is the missing link to understanding the mysteries of life and to understanding the poetic muse.
The second section of the collection is just as interesting. Some of the poems are more serious, but they are no less insightful. I loved that several included dogs. One image I know I will never forget is in the last stanza of “One Dog.” I can’t resist quoting it:
Yes, hope is a four-legged thing
that meets you after a long day
of reports and budgets, shivers its tail,
helicopters on the floor, humps
your shins, circles and circles and circles
until, exhausted, it flops on its back,
waits for your hand to reach down,
scratch its belly until it pisses
all over you in joy.
Another fun poem is “Catfish Have 27,000 Taste Buds,” which is more of a prose poem in paragraphs. Achatz tells us: “Cut a catfish open, you might find car keys you lost last Friday, or your sister who died of lymphoma five years ago. Dinosaurs or ice ages, dark matter or da Vinci. One catfish contains multitudes, feeds 5,000, with 15 baskets left over for breakfast.”
Other poems contain lines so deep that they stun you. In “One Species of Jellyfish Is Immortal,” we are asked which came first, jellyfish or God. The poet says, “before God even breathed, there was jellyfish in a blue nirvana of brine and tears.” Then we are told, “If you are touched by God/tendril of jellyfish, you are a chosen one. Bearer of a sadness that has existed before existence. Wail, gnash, hosanna your teeth. Something is about to be born again.”
The last poems in the “Coda” illustrate Bigfoot giving thanks and a valediction, but my favorite is the poet’s “Bigfoot Blessing” modeled after the Irish saying of “May the road rise up to meet you.” The poet’s blessings upon Bigfoot include:
May a bull moose scratch your back
with its palmate antlers.
May your lice be few,
Your grubs plentiful,
Your scat be soft,
Without bones.
Reader, may you take the time to read and savor A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders because Bigfoot clearly has much to teach us about the world, how to see it, and how to see ourselves. I so appreciate Martin Achatz sharing his most intimate moments with Bigfoot in these poems, and I wish him great happiness in his continued relationship with this hairy wonder of a muse.
A Bigfoot Bestiary and Other Wonders
By Martin Achatz
ISBN: 978-1-61599-834-0
Modern History Press
Release date 2024, paperback
