Natalie Peeterse's first chapbook, Black Birds: Blue Horses, An Elegy, is a walk through grief, #poetryreview

Natalie Peeterse's first chapbook, Black Birds: Blue Horses, An Elegy, is a walk through grief, a mystic catharsis hammered into leaping images and sweeping environs written for Nicole Dial, killed in Afghanistan with three others as they aided the International Rescue Committee. The elegy begins with a machine gun phone call  “one two: three four:...The heat blasts on...”, and the speaker is off, and in a classical sense becomes a walking poet among gods, a prophet against war. Her capital is not Rome, but Washington, and of course the heart, where all things human are governed.

Peeterse's imagery allows for taxi drivers, muggers, and DC streets to become points of reference as she travels through spaces, “a slide of time,” almost crossing over into death as she passes through stages of grief as if they were neighborhoods, boroughs, "glittering roads."  The DC setting is loaded, for sure, but wisely used as geography versus political soapboxing. It's not that the speaker cowers from making a statement, the places are allowed to be what they are without any further symbolism, keeping the focus on Nicole, rather than a cause.

The speaker's elegiac voice invokes broad music, Peeterse's lines are tight, stanzas compact, as the images leap with every poetic step.The effect is wholly spiritual, mystic. Grief, anger and quiet sorrow are trans-mutated by her journey, by her intensity. The stars become hung children, tourist  dumb june bugs. Accosted by a mugger, she unleashes Nicole's death as a sandstorm, and as some sort of poet-as-superhero vanquishes the mugger. The speaker is empowered by grief, she wields it, the spirit within the muse.   At the final steps of her journey, instead of an urn bearing Nicole's ashes, a jar of sand is left for the speaker, and her final poetic invocation is to open the world of Kabul, as a protest, as a warning, as a bridge to the underworld, as a bird of sorrow:

        a jar of sand on my doorstep...

I want to take it down to Pennsylvania Avenue

and shake it into the street...To watch the road to Kabul

open up before me---

Regardless of the kind of relationship the speaker had with Nicole Dial, the speaker's memories of Nicole are fluid with the poet's imagination. It doesn't matter whether the speaker is a lover, sister, daughter, friend, parent, stranger, because the reader experiences a moment of from each of these connections with Nicole.

Death, one of the most common and misunderstood phenomenon of the human experience requires a kind of elegiac process to understand. If we are bakers we bake, if we are painters we pick up a brush, if we are tradesmen we go back to work, lucky for us Natalie Peeterse is a poet.