Calendar Home
Previous Reading:
« J. W. MARSHALL
Next Reading:
LINDA BIERDS »
|
|
Open Books: Event Archive
May 26, 2005 07:30 PM
DENNIS NURKSE
We're pleased to welcome Mr. Nurkse, whose eighth book, Burnt Island, was
published this year by Knopf. His poems accomplish a fine balance between
sentiment and dry-eyed observation, exhibiting an understanding of the power
of an understated image to move the reader. The poem "4:00 AM" begins,
"Because it happened / it didn't seem real: / one man beating another." Mr.
Nurkse excels at that kind of surprising, purposeful, and efficient writing.
He is a long time New Yorker (in fact he's a former poet laureate of
Brooklyn), and several of his poems concern first-hand experience of the
September 11th destruction of the World Trade towers. The last section of
Burnt Island is a series on marine ecology. Most of those poems are named
after sea animals and written first-person (so to speak), so that Mr. Nurkse
creates an identification with the swirl of ocean life. "We live another
second / or much less, less than a blink, // until the code comes to know
itself / and the mind dreams another mind / that will survive it / there, in
the bright curtain of spray." Here's a poem from the volume:
Ruth
The face on the flyer
was serene as a god--
below, a phone number
and scratched note:
"even if you just glimpsed her,
even if you're not certain."
I bowed to that stare
and flinched at a smudge
where the invisible hand
pressed too hard.
At the curb a rhinestone purse
still held a thimble and a token.
I tripped over two votive candles.
One flame guttered. I knelt
but the wick curled into itself.
That night it rained, you could no longer
smell the steel burning.
When I came back to Union Square
the face was everywhere,
on a red construction cone,
a lamppost, a rental van,
safe in a maze of faces
but the woman had faded--
a cloud with a smudge
where I had seen hair,
the pearl necklace
a string of blobs:
you could still discern
the hand's tremor
but the words had fused
to a solid block:
"even if you just glimpsed her,
even if you're not certain."
-- D. Nurkse
|
|
