Three Books by Patricia Nelson
Reviewed by John Hart
Spokes of Dream or Bird. Lake Isabella, CA: Poetic Matrix Press, 2017.
Out of the Underworld. Lake Isabella, CA: Poetic Matrix Press, 2019.
In the Language of Lost Light. Lake Isabella, CA: Poetic Matrix Press, 2021.
Out of the Underworld. Lake Isabella, CA: Poetic Matrix Press, 2019.
In the Language of Lost Light. Lake Isabella, CA: Poetic Matrix Press, 2021.
Friends, it is said, should not review friends; nor teachers their former students. These rules are often broken, and I break them again because I want to talk about three books by Patricia Nelson, published in the last four years by Poetic Matrix Press. But I will try to talk about them first as if I did not know the author, or the tradition from which she comes.
That first response would resemble the one I have heard from many of her colleagues and admirers: “That’s brilliant, Pat, but I sometimes have no idea what you mean.”
The brilliance is hard to overlook. This is a risk-taking poet, using metaphors, for instance, of uncommon reach:
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. . . clouds
that blow away like fat gray roses. (Morgan to Arthur) His skin the color of twilight under the black of his hair. (The Mythical Animal) some pale animal spotted like a page. (At the Top) the small sun gleams and gutters in the gray light, gaining like a pearl. (December Daylight) the heart that rises a little and utters a brown noise like the pulsing, broken bird. (Daphne) |
Neruda comes to mind. Lorca. I also find myself comparing this work with that of another highly imagistic poet who has drawn much attention of late, Valzhyna Mort:
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Pick me for a sister, Antigone,
in this suspicious land I have a bright shovel of a face. (To Antigone, a Dispatch) |
Such vividness is can be taxing to contemporary taste. Critic William Logan, for instance, is of two minds about Mort’s imagery, complaining of too much “desperate simile or overwrought metaphor.” Nelson’s use of these devices is no less bold than Mort’s, but considerably more controlled.
Reading further in these books, one sees that images like those cited above—in which one real object is compared to (or conjoined with) another—are not really Nelson’s favorite resource. In many strong lines, she pairs abstractions with solidities:
Reading further in these books, one sees that images like those cited above—in which one real object is compared to (or conjoined with) another—are not really Nelson’s favorite resource. In many strong lines, she pairs abstractions with solidities:
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Fear is close around me,
like the noise of my clothing. (Fire) Then I saw him weigh my soul. He weighed it like an apple or a chicken. (Ariel) Do I dream a house to hold it with love and small black nails? (When I Return) The kingdom alters like a dune. (Arthur Is Dead) |
With successive books, Nelson seems to be moving ever further away from an imagery of objects, building her effects with lines that are all but free of the concrete—abstractions, in fact, but handled with some key twist away from any ordinary way of saying:
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Beauty pulled me with its calm. (Lancelot)
How steeply I blundered into my vacant soul, both grateful and unaware of falling. (Lancelot) There is stillness. Those at the final gate look up, having expiated all, rest their feet on the last shadow. (The Mountain Roars) They call upon the words they know—not many. Only an ignorant choice can, with pain and time, paint them wise. (The Lovers) They say I will live forever in this sadness without further instructions. (Galahad) |
Passages of all these kinds suffice to prove Nelson a poet of uncommon value. Which brings us to the second part of the rather common reaction: Huh?
There are, I think, two kinds of Huh? Some readers have grown accustomed to a diet of verse in which all things are explained or familiar, and thus may have a very low threshold for puzzlement. I think that only reader inexperience accounts for any seeming difficulty in such poems as “Woman and Gulls” and “Avenging Angels” (from Spokes of Dream or Bird); “The Lovers,” “Marcus,” and “The Mountain Roars” (from Out of the Underworld); and a slew of poems in her latest book, In the Language of Lost Light, including “Arthur to Lancelot,” “Lancelot,” “Arthur is Dead,” and “Grief Song.” I think that in these pieces Nelson has fully mastered her strong materials. And I think that this achievement already puts her in rarified company.
But there are other poems in which something intervenes between the appreciation of fine lines and the experience of the whole poem—a gap in which there arises another, and justified, kind of Huh? The question is not so much “What does this mean?” as “Where exactly have you taken me? What do I get from this?”
This problem is well known in the milieu in which Nelson first studied the craft: the classes of Lawrence Hart, mentor of the so-called “Activist” poets.[1] Hart required his students to build their poems from the line up, so to speak, achieving poetic intensity (of one of several kinds) in nearly every passage. The word Activist, so easy to misunderstand, was meant to express that demand: that the powers of language be activated as far as possible throughout. But the poet who followed this path would inevitably come to the challenge of creating works in which the parts do not (to borrow a term from Logan’s critique of Mort) “outshine” the whole.
Indeed, this problem is as old as Modernism. Hart Crane never solved it. The Surrealists and their heirs never tried and, indeed, did not give a damn. The Activists did (and do) give a damn, and have worked hard on methods of managing the forces of language they invoke.
Patricia Nelson is, it seems to me, in the middle of this struggle. True to her Activist roots, she makes high demands of herself. It’s like watching an admired athlete undertaking increasingly difficult maneuvers. Respect for every effort mingles with suspense: can she pull it off this time? Wow. Now, can she pull it off again?
When she doesn’t quite stick the landing, it seems to this reader, the problem is chiefly the temptation to put too much in: to keep on going after arrival. A short poem called “Island” concludes:
There are, I think, two kinds of Huh? Some readers have grown accustomed to a diet of verse in which all things are explained or familiar, and thus may have a very low threshold for puzzlement. I think that only reader inexperience accounts for any seeming difficulty in such poems as “Woman and Gulls” and “Avenging Angels” (from Spokes of Dream or Bird); “The Lovers,” “Marcus,” and “The Mountain Roars” (from Out of the Underworld); and a slew of poems in her latest book, In the Language of Lost Light, including “Arthur to Lancelot,” “Lancelot,” “Arthur is Dead,” and “Grief Song.” I think that in these pieces Nelson has fully mastered her strong materials. And I think that this achievement already puts her in rarified company.
But there are other poems in which something intervenes between the appreciation of fine lines and the experience of the whole poem—a gap in which there arises another, and justified, kind of Huh? The question is not so much “What does this mean?” as “Where exactly have you taken me? What do I get from this?”
This problem is well known in the milieu in which Nelson first studied the craft: the classes of Lawrence Hart, mentor of the so-called “Activist” poets.[1] Hart required his students to build their poems from the line up, so to speak, achieving poetic intensity (of one of several kinds) in nearly every passage. The word Activist, so easy to misunderstand, was meant to express that demand: that the powers of language be activated as far as possible throughout. But the poet who followed this path would inevitably come to the challenge of creating works in which the parts do not (to borrow a term from Logan’s critique of Mort) “outshine” the whole.
Indeed, this problem is as old as Modernism. Hart Crane never solved it. The Surrealists and their heirs never tried and, indeed, did not give a damn. The Activists did (and do) give a damn, and have worked hard on methods of managing the forces of language they invoke.
Patricia Nelson is, it seems to me, in the middle of this struggle. True to her Activist roots, she makes high demands of herself. It’s like watching an admired athlete undertaking increasingly difficult maneuvers. Respect for every effort mingles with suspense: can she pull it off this time? Wow. Now, can she pull it off again?
When she doesn’t quite stick the landing, it seems to this reader, the problem is chiefly the temptation to put too much in: to keep on going after arrival. A short poem called “Island” concludes:
|
The wave eats the quiet beach.
Stand upon that winnowing like a wish without a word. |
Only it doesn’t: it really ends
|
. . . like a wish without a word
for what it wants next. |
Many poems would gain power by more or less drastic subtraction: one fewer attention-getting words in a line; one fewer lines in a stanza; one or two fewer stanzas in a poem. Indeed, each of these volumes could stand to lose a few whole pieces. (And Ms. Nelson needs to take a twelve-month sabbatical from use of the word “light.”)
But here I am breaking my promise. I am applying a standard I would not dare apply to a writer whose development I had not watched for many years. As an editor, as a reader, as an anxious scanner for signs of muscle in our contemporary poetry scene, I should join the likes of the Harvard Review and shout a loud Hurrah! to this body of work.
After all, any poetry collection will contain many pieces that are trial runs, throat-clearings, outtakes, sketches for better ones to come. We should all wish to be judged by our best. I recall W. H. Auden’s sober comment on his own 1945 Collected. If a poet limited a book “to those poems for which he is honestly grateful,” Auden wrote, “his volume would be too depressingly slim.”
___________________________________
[1] Nelson describes this background generously in an introduction to Spokes of Dream or Bird.
Nota Bene: Click on the highlighted titles above for purchase information.
But here I am breaking my promise. I am applying a standard I would not dare apply to a writer whose development I had not watched for many years. As an editor, as a reader, as an anxious scanner for signs of muscle in our contemporary poetry scene, I should join the likes of the Harvard Review and shout a loud Hurrah! to this body of work.
After all, any poetry collection will contain many pieces that are trial runs, throat-clearings, outtakes, sketches for better ones to come. We should all wish to be judged by our best. I recall W. H. Auden’s sober comment on his own 1945 Collected. If a poet limited a book “to those poems for which he is honestly grateful,” Auden wrote, “his volume would be too depressingly slim.”
___________________________________
[1] Nelson describes this background generously in an introduction to Spokes of Dream or Bird.
Nota Bene: Click on the highlighted titles above for purchase information.