I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing

Lucia Perillo’s Truthful Essays on Illness, Poetry and Nature

Oct 2, 2007

The poet Lucia Perillo has written a painfully truthful, always enlightening book of essays about living with Multiple Sclerosis.

Lucia Perillo is the author of four books of poetry and has now written a book of essays, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing (Trinity University Press, 2007). There she writes first of all about life with Multiple Sclerosis.

In her thirties, Perillo was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system. MS has robbed her of the use of her legs, and so much more. I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing is mainly about living with the disease. The other two themes, poetry and nature, are both at its mercy, as is fitting, because so is Perillo’s life, in its entirety: her day-to-day practical existence, her inner life of hope and anger.

But this is not a dreary book, quite the contrary. The sharp wit and sassiness of Perillo’s poetry survives in these essays. And because the essay is a literal-minded medium that cannot afford poetic distance from its subject, it allows Perillo to be herself: obsessed, haunting, never easy. She tells it like it is – contending with “the freak,” the repeated vain hopes of a cure, the loss of sexiness – with a vengeance.

In many of the passages about nature, the prose is infused by the poetic, turning this or that phrase into something more beautiful and elusive than many a poem. But do not be fooled, though their subject is nature, these essays were dictated by the disease. The tension could not be more acute, since Perillo was an erstwhile park ranger in the Cascade Mountains who has had to lower her expectations of nature to gull-and bat-watching from wheelchair accessible ramps.

Her relations with others too, are pervaded by her illness. Her friends, fellow-sufferers, her memoired self (the intrepid ranger before the disease) and even her husband: all are to a certain degree at its mercy. This tension between refusing to be defined by illness, but defining everything else by it, makes I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing not for the faint of heart.

Though Perillo will, must, find compromises with the disease in many ways, she absolutely refuses to in her writing. The lowering of her expectations is never at an end and always painful, but Perillo will not give in to sentimentality or cliche. Her weapons are stark truth-telling, sharp wit, and wry, often cruel humor, some of it of the burst-out-laughing kind, some of it making one wince.

“But this is how time iterates itself for everyone, I know, I know, by hacking us to bits – the breast removed, the kidney taken. This is the storyboard of the modern body.”

This is honest writing and writing under duress. “Courageous” is not the right word for it, though it might apply very well to the reader of this book. A writer’s love for her audience is to some degree a reflection of her love for herself. Just like Perillo restlessly persecutes herself, she also hounds the reader. So I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing is a book that taxes the reader, but in the best sense of the word.

For unlike her poems, these essays do not break the heart, so don’t read them for compassion. Read them for the exceptionally truthful inside view of being ill for life. Read them to be rudely (and fully) awakened from any sentimental view you might have of illness. Be entertained, but be warned: I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing sometimes reads like a last book.

Also poetry, essays, and short fiction in the Paris Review, the Atlantic, the New Yorker.

The copyright of the article I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing in Political Science Books is owned by Katrien Vander Straeten. Permission to republish I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.