Diamonds wrought from disability in essay collection

Reading Lucia Perillo's exquisite collection of essays was an overwhelming experience at times: I often found myself swept away by the stark originality of her prose and the terse clarity of her thoughts.

Like this one: "While last year's therapist felt that my giving up hope had darkened my outlook, I think hope shackled me to my body as it dropped like a dead weight to the floor of the sea. And surrendering hope has left me feeling unburdened, lighter, strangely giddy as I float."

In the mid-1980s, Perillo was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and though she writes frankly about the ravages of the disease, she never lets it define her. Describing the obvious can be a risky business for a serious writer — discussing the elephant in the room as it were — and she knows it. "It takes courage to spend time considering nature when your life is circumscribed, because this means considering what you have lost," she notes, commenting on Emily Dickinson's penchant for reclusiveness.

The author of four books of poetry and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2000, Perillo came to the Northwest to be a park ranger more than 20 years ago. She now lives in Olympia.

At first glance, her essay topics in "I've Heard the Vultures Singing" — nature, solitude, illness and writing, among others — don't seem the stuff of compelling memoir. But Perillo packs power into every word. The MS has confined her to a wheelchair and she talks about feeling claustrophobic, while still aspiring to what she cannot be: a bicycling ornithologist, a figure skater, and always, always, a hiker. Never yielding to self-pity, she is revealing without being confessional — call it honesty — particularly in a surprising and affecting piece on her sex life.

Perillo's writing is varied as it is novel. Her riffs on how society considers people in wheelchairs give fresh meaning to the words "handicapped," "cripple" and "disabled." In one essay, she recalls her forays into all manner of alternative medicine — herbs, vitamins, acupuncture and psychic healers — with humor and poignancy.

Throughout the book, she works in thoughts about poetry and writing. Earlier in her life, she writes, "I had too much investment in the autobiographical myth, which I thought was necessary because I lacked the inventiveness not to write about actual life, and I thought that actual life required a grand myth to be interesting — what could be interesting about a pasty-skinned girl from the suburbs?" More than muses or quoted sages, the writers and artists she brings in are like third interlocutors in the room (along with author and reader), among them Aristotle, Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore and Susan Sontag.

While there is no obvious connection from one essay to next, other than MS, Perillo's voice is consistently unique. In perhaps the loveliest essay, she relates her quest to reach the bottom of a deep ravine, inaccessible to wheelchairs, in order to observe the sources of the birdsong she hears every day. Implicit in this little adventure is a comparison to the heights she once ascended (she has climbed Mount Rainier several times), but the conclusion is no less thrilling.

The reader comes away from this book thoroughly understanding the constraints on Perillo's physical movement through the world — because they are so keenly articulated — but also transformed by the limitless power of her imagination.

David Takami is the author of "Divided Destiny: A History of Japanese Americans in Seattle."