CELL BIOLOGY
   Convict's essays on the desert's bounty capture the essence  of a soul in pain

   By Mark Slouka

   Ken Lamberton would like you to believe his book, "Wilderness and Razor Wire," is about the smell of creosote and rain on the wind, about hawkmoths dipping from the wells of cactus. Don't believe him.

Don't be misled by the drawings of brittlebush and silverleaf oak (all done by Lamberton himself), or the well-intentioned, avuncular foreword by Richard Shelton, who taught Lamberton writing in prison workshops and at the University of Arizona. Though the nature writing here may be some of the best to come our way in a generation, this is not first and foremost a book about poppies and peppergrass. It is about the soul in pain. Reading it is like chatting with someone on the street and suddenly noticing there is blood running down his side.

All of which is to say that Lamberton (for the past 12 years an inmate of Tucson's Santa Rita Prison) has written something entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays on the nature of freedom and the freedom of nature, whose true subject, and greatest accomplishment, may be its own narrative voice.

Alternately unflinching and evasive, survivor-tough and self-lacerating (but always, always, possessed of an uncanny eye for detail), Lamberton is a character as compelling, in his way, as any fictional creation in recent memory. Hungry for atonement (as a 26-year-old science teacher he had a consensual affair with a 14-year-old student, for which he received the criminally excessive sentence of 12 years in prison), eager to flog himself for our benefit, he watches as his language — too passionate, too cynical, too everything — betrays him at every turn.

"When I came to this desert at the age of ten, I killed things," he begins, quick as Augustine to establish his credentials as a sinner. Within a paragraph he has confessed, unbidden, to brutality, ignorance and selfishness; described hanging the broken bodies of whiptail lizards on the spines of prickly pear cacti; wrung his hands over his former self. "Killing was my way of dealing with an environment I didn't understand," he explains, and as readers we breathe a sigh of relief. We know where we are — safe in Canaan, looking back on Egypt through the telescope of retrospective narration. But then comes the quick cut, the master stroke, seemingly unintentional yet carrying just the right touch of unrepentant pride: "And because everything was strange, I killed over and over again. It was my first religion."

This isn't a pose. Lamberton genuinely wants to be saved (and probably deserves it more than most): He plays guitar in the prison chapel, he conducts science classes for his fellow prisoners, he (rather meekly) protests the outrageous injustices of our penal system while fully accepting — again and again — his responsibility for his fate. He analyzes his fall, renounces his passion, speaks of God. And it doesn't work.

Everywhere he looks, the world seethes and pulses and bleeds, and cursed with the descriptive equivalent of perfect pitch, he must tell us about it. Thus a sun spider devouring a cricket leaves behind "a shrunken husk, twisted upon itself, head bent unnaturally to one side"; the lopped arm of a saguaro cactus reveals "a circlet of skeleton wrapped in white, spongy flesh"; a redtail hawk, pulling breast feathers from a dead raven, sends "black plumes parachuting on the air like ashes drifting away from a trash fire."

This is a man who can't look away. "For forty-five minutes we watched the redtail stuff its crop with long, red elastic ribbons of flesh pulled one after another from the raven's body. When the hawk finally flew off to settle on a light pole, strop its beak and preen, it left behind an eruption of feathers, some peeled bones, a pair of feet and a beak." Note the almost photographic precision of the image, the emotional economy, the attention to rhythm. This is fine work.

"Prison," Lamberton writes, "only concentrates and enhances the inevitable pain all relationships cause." It seems to have concentrated his language as well. Time and again, page after page, he gets it right. Rattlesnake weed creeps "over bare earth like spokes of a rimless wheel." Circles of toadstools on the desert floor are "ringworm on a giant scale." Sonoran desert toads, hopping up to the prison lights for insects, reject the lighted cigarette butts flipped to them by the inmates, "drawing in their eyes, scraping their tongues with tiny hands."

A vein of ecstasy — promiscuous, opportunistic — runs beneath much of the writing here, surfacing where least expected. Swallowtail butterflies "probe the flowers' narrow necks"; honeybees, "drenched with the semen of marigolds," drone in the heat. Bean pods "stand erect and fat on their stems . . . dried to the edge of bursting." This from a man who has repented his passion, rued his sins!

So compelling, ultimately, is the tension Lamberton orchestrates between penance and passion, self-disgust and defiance, that one readily forgives the occasional dull paragraph, the rare gratuitous cut; in the oddly homophobic chapter "Queen," for example, a cheap perfume is described as "the kind ugly women wear to bars," a description less unkind (which is forgivable in writing) than merely sloppy (which is not).

In 19th century New England, a literary genre called the captivity narrative briefly flowered into popularity, then died. The formula required that a victim be abducted by "savages," endure a harrowing "captivity" in the wilderness and eventually be returned to the bosom of family and God.

Ken Lamberton has survived his captivity. Fortunately for us, he's retained a memory of the darkness, the firelight, the heathenish rites of the world beneath our feet.