Deer Hit

Contemporary poet and novelist Jon Loomis encompasses a combination of literary, academic, and popular success. His madcap crime novels skewer social norms with humor, precise detail, and a host of colorful characters. His largely narrative poems use figurative language and sensory detail to create a sense of immediacy, and often nostalgia. Most often, Loomis searches for sense in a senseless world, for compassion and understanding in a fractured terrain where everyone seems more concerned for their own immediate pleasure than for the preservation of anything outside themselves.

Loomis’s contemporary poem “Deer Hit” (2001) fuses fear, regret, menace, love, loss, and the thinnest possibility for grace. The poem may be one of Loomis’s best known works, as its universal themes have made it a popular choice in English and writing classes at the high school and college level. A poet of the Midwest and Appalachia, Loomis’s diverse works resonate as the chaotic underside of the American Dream.

Poet Biography

Jon Loomis won the FIELD prize in 1997 for his first book, Vanitas Motel. “Deer Hit,” one of his most frequently reprinted poems, appears in his second book, The Pleasure Principle (2001). In addition to a third book of poems, The Mansion of Happiness (2016), three mystery novels round out Loomis’s current works. The Frank Coffin mysteries all take place in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Loomis spent time developing his poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center.

A son of Ohio, Loomis was born in 1959 and grew up in Athens, home to Ohio University where Loomis majored in Creative Writing. Loomis migrated to another region of Appalachia for his MFA at the University of Virginia. After graduate studies, Loomis received fellowships at the legendary Provincetown Fine Arts Works Center and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He went on to teach across the southeastern United States until returning to Wisconsin.

Loomis’s mystery novels garner enthusiastic reviews for his wit and his casts of zany characters. Darkly comic social satires, Loomis’s mysteries probe the same flaws and hypocrisies of human nature as his poetry. Conspiracy mongers, religious zealots, bureaucrats, opportunistic politicians, and the entire contingent of the faithless undergo ruthless scrutiny in Loomis’s prose and poetry. Loomis’s turns of phrase and sense of humor undercut a looming darkness and doubt throughout his work.

Loomis teaches English and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Amid widespread changes in United States systems of higher education, Loomis advocates fiercely for the equitable treatment of academic workers, as a character in a Loomis narrative might do.

Poem Text

Loomis, Jon. “Deer Hit.” 2001. Poets.org

Summary

In the poem “Deer Hit,” a dramatic narrative takes on greater urgency as it unfolds in present tense and second person. The reader begins off-balance, cast in the opening lines as “drunk” (Line 1) and “swerving” (Line 2) behind the wheel of a car on a road made up of “all curves” (Line 3). Having demanded the reader’s undivided attention, the poem barrels on through the dark into a cluster of deer: a “road full of eyeballs” (Line 6), the synecdoche evoking a spooky but vivid depiction of headlights catching the deer’s faces in the dark.

Sickening sounds and tactile imagery follow the accident itself, placing the reader in the terrifying immediate aftermath of a crash. An accumulation of gerunds—drifting, running, spinning, scrambling in Lines 10 through 16—sustain the chaos and circling motions of the car and the driver’s panicked thoughts. The disarray sets the scene for the driver’s otherwise unreasonable decision to place the injured deer in his shattered vehicle, driving home in spite of his own as-yet uncertain but possibly serious injuries with a writhing injured deer in the back seat.

With the reader still shocked from the events of a real-time car accident, the gathering up of a bleeding wild animal, and the driver’s multiplying injuries (Lines 26-27), the speaker employs a technique seen in thrillers like The Terminator; stopped at a traffic light, nearly home, the half-dead deer resurrects to bite the driver. A struggle inside the car goes on until the deer becomes exhausted and collapses again.

At the driver’s home, another character enters the narrative. The driver’s father becomes an accomplice and a witness as the driver enlists his help in the pathos of the accident’s aftermath, including the question of the writhing deer still in the backseat of the car. The father’s advice and action, though also imperfect in its assessment of the situation, heightens the absurdity of the choice to bring the deer home. The driver reflects on his motives; here, the use of second-person invites the reader to evaluate his or her own choices in the wake of bad decisions.

In the final lines of the poem, father and child, both having been drunk but now sobered slightly by the horror of mortality, work together to dispatch the half-dead deer. With the chaos finished and the cleanup complete, the driver moves forward bearing lifelong physical and emotional marks from the evening’s events. The last line reveals the driver’s personal reflection regarding his complicity in the destruction.