Customer Reviews

The Border Kingdom

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Nurske is one of our best and most mysterious poets, and a new volume by him is always an occasion. Most of his fine-boned poems are exquisitely crafted from short lines and words carefully selected for maximum psychic resonance. He's probably accomplished more with the Surrealist tradition of Spanish modernism, that of Lorca and Jimenez, than any other poet of his generation; I suspect this is because he uses it with such a light hand. The untortured strangeness in Nurske flows directly from his acute observations. In "Exile's Child" he describes a painful family outing; hear how the first few lines immediately detonate the poem's power:

I asked my father

permission to kill a fly.

I came back and asked

--could I kill another?

He thought for a while

and said--No. Evening was taking

the sting off a family outing.

The son becomes angry at his father and felt "...he was asleep, like the sand,/like the striped umbrella whose shadow/fell at right angles to night." At the close the boy says he heard the drone of the flies only when he "..knelt and held my breath/stock-still by the banked coals." In the poem "Sacrifice", the boy punishes a stuffed bunny with unimaginable visciousness, a rehearsal scene for future victims of torture. There are brilliant poems with echoes of 9-11 (like "After A Bombing" in which a man who was somewhere else at the time "felt good fortune on his shoulders,/a tower he'd have to carry")as well as poems of self-discovery, "the I" in "A Child in Brooklyn" recalling the "I" in Bishop's "In the Waiting Room", and delicious poems of marriage in middle age and the confusion of a sudden wakening. Here is "Late Summer" in toto:

When the rain woke me

I no longer knew

and had to remind myself:

this is darkness,

that is the wineglass,

this is the blowing curtain,

that's the immense city,

it's late in my life

but early in August,

this is my wife,

naked in my arms.

The Border Kingdom has a greater sampling of long poems and poem cycles than we usually encounter in Nurske's books. In keeping with the collection's title, there are several poems devoted to place, whether the locus is that of the poet's actual habitation (Brooklyn)or an imaginary realm linking Biblical events to present-day horrors. This book gives us a wonderful poet working at the top of his powers; as a bonus, it's also a beautiful example of the bookmaker's art. What could be better?