Customer Reviews

Some Ether: Poems

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

When I first heard that Nick Flynn's book Some Ether was a collection of poems which dealt mostly which his mother's suicide, I decided I would probably avoid it. Yet another confessional poet writing about how awful his life has been just didn't appeal to me.

But then I looked at a copy. And immediately bought it. Because Flynn does something far more than just write about his childhood trauma -- he transforms this awful experience into a series of dry, deeply affecting meditations. It isn't unnecessarily depressing, and it certainly isn't self-pitying. These are poems which dig into the core of human experience and emotion.

Many of the poems are fragmentary or collage-like bursts of imagery, memory, reflection, dreams. A quick first reading lets you notice many beautiful or quirky lines ("I'm sick of God & his teaspoons"), but also makes you feel a bit like the reader of a collection of postcards and shopping lists sent from a psychiatric ward. It's a unique feeling. A closer reading, though, reveals the art. Reading the poems together, slowly, listening for the harmonies and discords, becomes an overwhelming experience. By the time you reach the last lines of the last poem -- "My fingers/ tangle your hair, trace/ your skull, your face so radiant// I can barely look into it." -- you have been through a full emotional journey, a sensual quest for meaning.

It's not a perfect collection, but it shouldn't be. Despite the high quality of their crafting, these poems are raw. There are gaps and crevices between them. Terrain such as this needs to be rough.

Having read Nick Flynn's poem "Bag of Mice" in a journal or online I couldn't wait to buy his first book. The poems in "Some Ether" deal with intense personal experiences, and I was afraid, the poems would suffer from this weight. They don't. The poems are beautiful in the sense that they are honest on the page-- by that I mean I know this is art, an artifical communication between body and soul yet the poems tell the truth of the moment they speak about. Does that make sense? I want other readers to know that these poems illustrate their world successfully because they don't wander away from it. This isn't a honesty that borders on confession or pleas for sympathy. This is a honesty that carefully draws out the painful-shocks of each event by making them into beautiful lines; lines that reimagine these moments because they were so powerfully felt that they need to be written down in order for the poems/art to continue.

It's a relatively easy thing to write from a safe and ironic distance about nothing; practically anyone can do it, as the MFA-mills have proven. It's much riskier (and potentially far more rewarding) to write with genuine feeling about the Big Bad, pounding on the door with its meat hook. Flynn isn't perfect--some of these poems jump the tracks at the crucial moment--but he ought to get points for having something difficult and meaningful to say, and mostly figuring out how to say it--unlike so many of the callow, academic-hearted poseurs that pretend to write poetry these days. We've forgotten, somehow, that mere cleverness is its own form of self-indulgence. Ironic detachment won't comfort us much in hard times; there are a few poems in this collection that might.

I'm not as a general rule crazy about poetry.I don't pretend to know much about the artform of poetry,the variations in style and what makes a great poem from a technical point of view. I do know that when I picked up this book and read the poems in it, I cried....If a poem is meant to be a collection of words which is an intensely personal expression of something in the poet's life, and which can convey to the reader some of the emotion felt by the writer, then this collection succeeds in its purpose. I take issue with the reviews which described these works as whiny and self-serving, they nothing of the sort, nor are they trite. Though the life conveyed on these pages might have been deserving of pity, Nick never asks for it. To the "reviewer" who wanted something to lift her spirits, I would suggest that she go buy some Helen Steiner Rice or a book of "Love Is.." cartoons; it's not this poet's job to make you feel warm and fuzzy about suicide and sadness....This is not a sugar-coated view of the world, but one in which pain and sorrow stand on their own and are not denied; they are large part of our human experience whether we want to face that or not. If we are ever to have the chance of getting through our pain, we need to feel it. Nick makes you feel the sadness, and that brings release, as I hope it did for him....My income is not such that I am able to spend more than an hour's wages on a book, for any reason, unless I really find some value in it. My family and I were deeply touched by the poems in this collection...(PS... A few of these reviwers might want to learn how to spell before they presume to criticize another's work!)

I read most of the first books of poetry that come out, but this is the one I keep coming back to. I think it's fairly easily the best first book in the last ten years or so. Some dislike it, I know, because it's autobiographical, sincere and a times maybe a bit sentimental--things many first book poets, indoctrinated in a fear of "subjectivity" by their MFA programs and the editorial preferences of magazines edited by Iowa/New York hipsters, would rather die than risk being accused of. So this isn't yet another book striving to be linguistically or philosophically experimental (whether or not after Stein, Pound, Ashbery and the other modernists and postmodernists such writing is actually hopelessly derivative) or which guards its emotions like a Catholic school girl guards her virginity. This is simply work which sooner or later is going to crowd most everybody else off the table.

I regret having missed the opportunity to meet Nick Flynn, as he was signing books and giving a lecture about "Some Ether" at the state college where I live. Before that I had heard very little about him, and soon as I heard the word "confessional" in reference to his poetry I decided not to go. Having pored over this collection for almost a year now, I wish I could go back just to have a few words with the guy.

This is not Gen-x, rehab riddled whining; it is emotionally powerful work from a man still trying to make sense of his traumatic past through the medium of poetry, which he has such a tremendous aptitude at that the subject matter ("depressing" or not) doesn't really matter.

It is only confessional in the sense of being intensely private; his mother's suicide and the alcoholism of his father have become shattered mirrors which he tries to reassemble in order to gain a coherent sense of self. Right from the first poem it would be impossible not to empathize with his plight or turn away: "At the end there were straws/in her glove compartment/I'd split them open to taste the familiar bitter residue/near the end
I ate all her Percodans/hungry to know how far they could take me/A bottle of red wine each night moved her along as she wrote/"I feel too much", again and again/You asked how and I said, Suicide, and you asked/how and I said, An overdose, and then she shot herself/and your eyes filled with wonder/so I added/In the chest, so you wouldn't think/her face was gone/and it mattered/somehow/that you knew this. . ."

Flynn manages to make some sense of his horrific childhood in his later poetry, but "Some Ether" is more a masterful exorcism of personal demons. This is not "Young and Depressed In America" or anything like the self pitying trash that lines the bookshelves these days. Flynn does not ask for undue entitlement, only that we listen.

SOME ETHER is a beautifully rendered and powerful account of Nick Flynn's journey up to and after the suicide of his mother. The poems are immediate and clear and stay with the reader long after the last page has been read.

Nick Flynn's day-job is training teachers and teaching writing to young people as a member of Columbia University's Writing Project. Some Ether is a collection of impressive poetry that documents a major talent for this award winning poet. Radio Thin Air: Keep the radio on softly/so it sounds like two people in the next/room, maybe/your parents, speaking calmly about something/important--a lock/of cash, the broken/cellar pump. Marconi believed/we are wrapped in voices, that waves/never die, merely space themselves/farther & farther apart,/passing through the ether he imagined/floating the planets. But wander/into the kitchen & no one/will be there, the tiny red eye of the radio, songs/that crawl through walls,/voices pulled from air. Marconi/wanted to locate the last song/the band on the deck of the Titanic played,/what Jesus said/on the cross, he kept dialing/the frequency, staring across the Atlantic,/his ear to the water,/there, can you hear it?

This may be considered a bias review since I had a class under Nick Flynn's wing, but unlike my other professors, his poetry is deeply resounding and touching. From the reviews I read, it's disappointing that people think his poetry suffers because it doesn't play with the form or offer anything new. Even if he is "confined," he does it very well. The poem Bag of Mice is just simply beautiful. Its brevity, emotion, and honesty should be appreciated. While the mother-complex may tire some readers, there are others such as Cartoon Physics and No Map that kept me interested. I recommend all beginning poets should study Flynn's book and appreciate good poetry.

Was recommended this book, and in writing my own manuscript of poems, was eager to dive into it. I really needed some support from my writing elder. I never received the book or a mail notice. So I guess this means I'm reviewing Amazon, or UPS, or maybe just my, now, well read neighbors. Maybe I'll find this book on the clearance rack at Half Price books and have a chance to read it, or share it with my neighbors, and ask them if it looks familiar. Great book. As ethereal as ever.