Jamie Wendt Reviews “The Deep Blue of Neptune” by Terry Belew

In the introduction to poet Terry Belew’s debut poetry collection, The Deep Blue of Neptune, winner of the 2024 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, judge Alison Hawthorne Deming writes, “For Terry Belew, the local is in the lens through which the universal struggles of our mortal condition can be seen.” Throughout these poems, Belew’s speaker wrestles with grief from his past and for the future in rural America, through its guns, whiskey, solitude, and all its nuances and complexities. 

Belew’s writing is grounded in a place where wildlife and rodents make their way into the speaker’s childhood, where violence and survival intermingle with beauty and regret. In the litany poem, “Wish List for a Deity,” Belew writes:

            Forgive my vices and replace my thoughts 
with an iPhone… 

Forgive me 
            for shooting a mostly road-killed raccoon – 

too precious to stay half-dead in the road – 
            in the face.

Belew mixes sarcasm and humor with a raw empathy for animals and life around him, causing him to plead, “Please tell me which way to live” in the last line of the poem. Figuring out how to live with tragedy and confusion all around is at the center of many of the poems in this collection. 

A similar moment reveals itself in “Pest Control,” where the speaker’s dad “filled a Shop-Vac quarter-full of water / and stuck the hose / into the mouse hole” followed by the speaker and his brother shooting the mice “with pellet guns, their lead-riddled / bodies writhing until laying / still as frost’s mercy.” The pain in these images shows an environment where a cacophony of unwanted sounds bleeds into the poet, who stacks these moments together to create the narrative. There is a wildness in the setting that the speaker frequently tries to cope with, and the poetic meandering style with silences across sections of the page imitates this content. 

Belew’s poems begin in intimate spaces, such as in a backyard garden of melons or in the waiting room of a hospital with his son. Yet the poems always expand outward to larger topics to be contended with, such as death, poverty, social media, and parenthood. In the poem “Animal Science,” after describing a police officer pulling over a girl whom he has pulled over before “because he knows about her / fentanyl…”, Belew writes:

… I know
of no other animal that keeps poisoning 

itself, Sodium Nitrate and Yellow #5,
                        cheeseburgers and bourbon, the constant
            stream of shootings in the news

                        reminding me I’m alive.

Over and over, there is tenderness riding beneath each image. Belew’s word choice is playful in sound and careful in building enjambment and wonder. 

Belew also recalls and reflects upon traumatic stories, including the murder of a friend in the poem “For Certain.” He admits, “This isn’t my story to tell,” though through the details of memories he had with this friend, the last time he talked to him, and the details he discovered about his death make the situation his own. He writes:

The last time I spoke to him, we were ordering
                   Chinese for our families near the town
we grew up in. We talked about playing music

                   ten years ago, his rapping snare, double kick
drums, my Telecaster plugged into a now-sold
                   half-stack, both of us trying and failing to stay in time.  

The idea of “trying and failing to stay in time” is experienced in other poems that bring readers into the speaker’s childhood, such as “Trash Pile,” where a child “wanted to see an aerosol can / explode”, causing his younger brother to end up in the hospital. Upon his return, “his face was scarred as war metal…” and the speaker reflects, “Now, when something detonates / at the neighbors’, I smell / burnt flesh, chlorofluorocarbon, / think of the boy’s lipless smile.” 

Belew’s use of imagery highlights his capacity to notice the anger and guilt for the way we live, whether due to recklessness, and dreams we lose sight of when we notice our over-reliance on technology, which he explores in the poem “Wish List While Reading the News on my Phone,” where he begs, “Find me stupid / videos so I laugh, because the news / is someone killing another…” We can relate to finding ways to avoid the tragedies around us, to avoid the absences we feel in our lives. 

Belew explores his landscape through sestinas, sonnets, list poems, and free verse lyrics that pay close attention to sound and movement across the page. Central to the collection’s architecture are Belew’s three stunning sestinas – “The Anatomy of Envy,” “The Anatomy of the Cold,” and “The Anatomy of Forgiveness.” These poems punctuate the book with contemplation on selfhood and parenthood, as well as conflicts between nature and society. And despite all our struggles, there is language, there is the lyric, and there is The Deep Blue of Neptune.

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Terry Belew lives in rural Missouri. He received his MFA from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where he won the 2022 and 2023 Helen W. Kenefick Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Recent work can be found in journals such as Meridian, Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Gulf Stream, and Tar River Poetry, among many others. 

The Deep Blue of Neptune is available at Kent State University Press, and on Amazon.