In the Wild Light

Along with the discovery of the transformational energy of love (which Cash discovers in renewing his friendship with Delaney), the experience that centrally defines the transition from childhood to adulthood is the experience of loss and the firsthand lessons about the dynamic of grief. Two years after discovering his mother’s dead body in the bathroom of the squalid trailer they shared, Cash still cannot shake the memory of the feeling of his mother’s body, “the organic weight of a lifeless human body” (39). The “feral stench of shit” and the “imminent decay” (39) assaulted his nose, and even now he dreams of hallways with doors identical to the bathroom door he had to push against to find his mother’s body. Such vividly horrific recollections provide an early statement that the grief surrounding traumatic events is not so easily overcome.

In the hospital as he watches his Papaw struggle for every breath, Cash relives that same helplessness and vulnerability as he struggles to handle the pain of losing his grandfather, who has been his primary source of emotional and spiritual support since his mother’s overdose. Papaw’s death rattles Cash deeper than he expected, for as he says himself, “I don’t know how to live under the sun of a God whose harvest is everything I love” (325). In reaching out to first Delaney and then to Alex and his grandmother, Cash slowly maneuvers through the treacherous process of grief. Initially, he cannot fathom the depths of his sorrow and believes that redemption from this loss is simply not possible. He wallows in his grief, saying, “I’m realizing that every triumph, large and small, that I have from now until the day I die will be diminished, if only a little, by my inability to share it with [Papaw]” (343). In discovering the comfort and support of his friends and his family, Cash taps into that tonic spirit of togetherness that disciplines the training sessions with his crew teammates. Working together creates positive energy. It is Dr. Atkins, however, who guides the emotionally devastated Cash through his grief by reminding him that poetry can turn his pain into “fire.” She suggests that poetry both will help Cash come to grips with grief because it illuminates the complications of loss and provides comforts like a banked fire.

In the end, without the benefit of Christianity (Papaw never abandoned the local church but never embraced it either, for its racism, bigotry, and anti-gay bias), Cash nonetheless comes to understand that grief is part of the world, that grief alone lets a person know how much they love that which they have lost. Grief, he discovers, is a powerful and authentic feeling that shapes and redefines who we are. “Feeling is a thing that’s ours only, a thing we don’t borrow” (383), he writes in a poem as he struggles to understand his grief.

Cash initially confesses, “I don’t know if I’m a big poetry guy” (123), and in a novel that seldom indulges the sting of irony, Cash’s response to his academic advisor’s advice that he enroll in an Introduction to Poetry class during his first semester at Middleford qualifies as wonderfully ironic. He is, as it turns out, very big into poetry. Under the guidance of Dr. Britney Rae Adkins, a published poet in her own right with deep roots in Tennessee, Cash comes to discover, one hesitant step after another, the transformative power of poetry. This dynamic is made immediately apparent in Dr Atkins’s first class lecture, when she extols to a skeptical Cash the power of poetry:

[Poetry] heals wounds. It opens our eyes to wonder and ugliness and beauty and brutality. Poetry can be that one light that lasts the night. The warmth that survives the winter. The harvest that survives the long drought. The love that survives death (161).

Much like the overture to a complex opera, this introductory lecture touches on all the themes that Cash will come to embrace. As he is rocked by his departure from home, his misguided infatuation with Vi, his rediscovery of his friendship with Delaney, and ultimately, the death of his grandfather, Cash comes to see the power of poetry to give voice to feelings that otherwise would fester and corrode. Initially, when Cash attempts to actually write a poem, he is overwhelmed by the concept of a poem’s form and by the requirements of prosody. However, Dr. Atkins assures Cash that poetry does not begin with rhymes and rhythm. Instead, it begins with courage and honesty. She quotes one of her favorite poets, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nature poet Mary Oliver: “Just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate” (195).

Cash comes to appreciate poetry as a way to explore the world and expand his awareness of its beauty and its terrors. The novel itself features several examples of Cash’s poetry—the lines are conversation, the images rich and layered, but above all they are honest, Cash directing his open and unblinking gaze on his subject, whether it is the world of Sawyer, the chaos of his attraction to Vi, or the grief over his grandfather’s death. In the closing pages, Cash affirms the true power of poetry. Healing now from the grief over his Papaw’s death, he sits on the porch where he and his Papaw would rock together. The rocker next to him is empty, but Cash refuses to concede to depression or despair. Instead, he takes up his notebook and writes, “I sit with my notebook and pen in the wild light of the day’s end” (415).