Denton Loving. Feller: Poems. Mercer University Press, 2025. Reviewed by Noah Soltau, August 24, 2025.
We can read Loving’s third full-length collection, Feller, from Mercer University Press, as a meditation on sex and death. If we look a little deeper, pay closer attention, it is a meditation on becoming, on moving with and against desire. The ars poetica for this collection is “The Octopus School of Poetry,” which asks the reader to consider the writer’s response to existence: ink and too much heart. This poem is clever, like its octopus subject, and frames the speaker’s goals: escape from the glass jar, play, live life. If the speaker of these poems must write, what compels him? An answer arrives in the title poem, “Feller:” “Praise decay and decomposition… Praise the quickening pulse and the flowing blood.” Living and dying, embracing mortality like a lover, celebrating becoming, are the beating hearts of this collection. Readers will notice this from the first page, from the prologue poem “Bluebird Dreams of Red Fox,” where Loving introduces the reader to a “death-kiss-is-beautiful” desire.
Desire and destiny buffet the speaker of these poems, who often expresses an impatience with the way things are and an aching loneliness in response to things that were and that have not yet come to pass. The unresolvable tension is a kind of time-sickness, a resistance to becoming. This philosophical tension of becoming in the tradition to which Loving belongs originates with Hegel, but it arrives in this collection with “A Letter to Rilke,” where Loving’s speaker quotes Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet to interrogate his own poetic impulses and confess his own shortcomings. He finds he is “afraid to die and afraid not to, which is to say, afraid to live.” Overcoming this fear is simple, deceptively so: pay attention. Loving, like Rilke, asks us to be patient, to hold dear the questions, to allow for mystery like locked rooms and books written in a strange language, even as he knows, like his speaker, his readers resent impatience, fear hurt and change, search longingly for meaning.
Loving frames both mystery and longing by paying close attention to plants and animals. In “Under the Chestnut Tree,” the “smell of smoke, smell of sex” invites contemplation of pleasure; in “Budburst,” “a tender explosion” serves as a model for the “meager” ways a man can live, and in “Rosy Maple Moth,” readers finds them “resting from the rough work of pollination and procreation.” They are just waiting for readers to notice, that they, too, may need rest from their “jagged desires.” The mystery here is, perhaps, why we might neglect these aspects of our own desiring.
Noticing is the key. Loving uses attention like a tool, a flashlight to dispel misapprehension instead of darkness. He pays attention to ritual, human institutions, and desires in context which become, like his plant and animal subjects, fleeting, small scale, ephemeral. In “Thirst,” that desire is obsessive: “when you don’t have water, it’s all you think about.” It compels us, in fact; in “Do You Hear the Cicadas?,” the speaker asks, “What makes him think it will be different, this time?” Desire leads the speaker out of himself. Desire is reactive and proactive, messy, evidence of our mortality and therefore ephemeral beauty. In “Breach,” the speaker notes that “the ocean we desire might desire us to live a little longer on dry land.” In “Lock the Moon,” those forces that are beyond us are “always laughing at desire.” Ephemera—small animals, photos of a lover through a sideview mirror, drunken nights in bars, airport luggage carousels, the life of a coal town—form a constellation in Loving’s nighttime mythology.
These human rituals and institutions, like air travel, getting dressed, religion, writing poetry, falling in love, are fleeting as the rosy maple moth. They are also the site of mirth, precisely because of their transiency. Loving claims that “Love is Slippery,” perhaps contingent on the Volunteer Orange of a pair of athletic trainers. Who says shoes can’t influence our destiny? We also can’t bring European Jesus home with us. “Tiffany Wants to Talk to Jesus,” but he’s “only in our hearts, baby girl,” not sleepy-eyed and bearded at the bar. This humor-in-sadness is a subspecies of the “death-kiss-is-beautiful” longing of the bluebird. Sadness is a little death; humor is holding it lightly. Impatience with mystery comes from fear. Attention to it comes from love.
The mystery, the unknowable, and the patience for it, are important to Rilke and presumably his young poet. Rilke liked to be alone in castles, so his locked room metaphor worked for him. Loving, though, is a contemporary Appalachian man, so an animal locked in an old pickle jar, working his way out to join the rest of the animals in an explosion of ink and sex and a generations-long takedown of crumbling social and economic institutions is more his style, and that’s what he has brought readers in this collection.
Loving’s speaker has, all at once, too much time and not enough. The dialectic he repeats throughout the collection is one of coming closer, becoming closer, to the subjects of his poems. That Loving treats the mountains and the coal fields and the birds and the girls in bars drinking Amaretto Sours with exactly the same care and attention means, for readers, that we have the opportunity to claw back our attention, like Rilke’s young poet, from the contents of the locked rooms and the meaning of the books in foreign languages, and ask, what do we desire that has brought us here? How alienated are we from our own animal bodies? How far away are we from each other?
Part of Loving’s answer is that those desires, like our material and spiritual conditions, are always in flux, always becoming. Like his octopus, filling and slipping from containers, playful, committed, Loving asks his readers to both contend and be patient with desire, to pay attention, to bear “the burden of those extra hearts."
We can read Loving’s third full-length collection, Feller, from Mercer University Press, as a meditation on sex and death. If we look a little deeper, pay closer attention, it is a meditation on becoming, on moving with and against desire. The ars poetica for this collection is “The Octopus School of Poetry,” which asks the reader to consider the writer’s response to existence: ink and too much heart. This poem is clever, like its octopus subject, and frames the speaker’s goals: escape from the glass jar, play, live life. If the speaker of these poems must write, what compels him? An answer arrives in the title poem, “Feller:” “Praise decay and decomposition… Praise the quickening pulse and the flowing blood.” Living and dying, embracing mortality like a lover, celebrating becoming, are the beating hearts of this collection. Readers will notice this from the first page, from the prologue poem “Bluebird Dreams of Red Fox,” where Loving introduces the reader to a “death-kiss-is-beautiful” desire.
Desire and destiny buffet the speaker of these poems, who often expresses an impatience with the way things are and an aching loneliness in response to things that were and that have not yet come to pass. The unresolvable tension is a kind of time-sickness, a resistance to becoming. This philosophical tension of becoming in the tradition to which Loving belongs originates with Hegel, but it arrives in this collection with “A Letter to Rilke,” where Loving’s speaker quotes Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet to interrogate his own poetic impulses and confess his own shortcomings. He finds he is “afraid to die and afraid not to, which is to say, afraid to live.” Overcoming this fear is simple, deceptively so: pay attention. Loving, like Rilke, asks us to be patient, to hold dear the questions, to allow for mystery like locked rooms and books written in a strange language, even as he knows, like his speaker, his readers resent impatience, fear hurt and change, search longingly for meaning.
Loving frames both mystery and longing by paying close attention to plants and animals. In “Under the Chestnut Tree,” the “smell of smoke, smell of sex” invites contemplation of pleasure; in “Budburst,” “a tender explosion” serves as a model for the “meager” ways a man can live, and in “Rosy Maple Moth,” readers finds them “resting from the rough work of pollination and procreation.” They are just waiting for readers to notice, that they, too, may need rest from their “jagged desires.” The mystery here is, perhaps, why we might neglect these aspects of our own desiring.
Noticing is the key. Loving uses attention like a tool, a flashlight to dispel misapprehension instead of darkness. He pays attention to ritual, human institutions, and desires in context which become, like his plant and animal subjects, fleeting, small scale, ephemeral. In “Thirst,” that desire is obsessive: “when you don’t have water, it’s all you think about.” It compels us, in fact; in “Do You Hear the Cicadas?,” the speaker asks, “What makes him think it will be different, this time?” Desire leads the speaker out of himself. Desire is reactive and proactive, messy, evidence of our mortality and therefore ephemeral beauty. In “Breach,” the speaker notes that “the ocean we desire might desire us to live a little longer on dry land.” In “Lock the Moon,” those forces that are beyond us are “always laughing at desire.” Ephemera—small animals, photos of a lover through a sideview mirror, drunken nights in bars, airport luggage carousels, the life of a coal town—form a constellation in Loving’s nighttime mythology.
These human rituals and institutions, like air travel, getting dressed, religion, writing poetry, falling in love, are fleeting as the rosy maple moth. They are also the site of mirth, precisely because of their transiency. Loving claims that “Love is Slippery,” perhaps contingent on the Volunteer Orange of a pair of athletic trainers. Who says shoes can’t influence our destiny? We also can’t bring European Jesus home with us. “Tiffany Wants to Talk to Jesus,” but he’s “only in our hearts, baby girl,” not sleepy-eyed and bearded at the bar. This humor-in-sadness is a subspecies of the “death-kiss-is-beautiful” longing of the bluebird. Sadness is a little death; humor is holding it lightly. Impatience with mystery comes from fear. Attention to it comes from love.
The mystery, the unknowable, and the patience for it, are important to Rilke and presumably his young poet. Rilke liked to be alone in castles, so his locked room metaphor worked for him. Loving, though, is a contemporary Appalachian man, so an animal locked in an old pickle jar, working his way out to join the rest of the animals in an explosion of ink and sex and a generations-long takedown of crumbling social and economic institutions is more his style, and that’s what he has brought readers in this collection.
Loving’s speaker has, all at once, too much time and not enough. The dialectic he repeats throughout the collection is one of coming closer, becoming closer, to the subjects of his poems. That Loving treats the mountains and the coal fields and the birds and the girls in bars drinking Amaretto Sours with exactly the same care and attention means, for readers, that we have the opportunity to claw back our attention, like Rilke’s young poet, from the contents of the locked rooms and the meaning of the books in foreign languages, and ask, what do we desire that has brought us here? How alienated are we from our own animal bodies? How far away are we from each other?
Part of Loving’s answer is that those desires, like our material and spiritual conditions, are always in flux, always becoming. Like his octopus, filling and slipping from containers, playful, committed, Loving asks his readers to both contend and be patient with desire, to pay attention, to bear “the burden of those extra hearts."