Why Speak?: Poems [Hardcover]

Nathaniel Bellows (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2007

A debut collection, exhibiting exceptional narrative and lyrical gifts, that explores the realms of memory, human emotion, and the natural world.

These layered, braided narratives combine images of landscape and nature, childhood memories and family history, evoked paintings and performances. Nathaniel Bellows's verse is intimate yet inviting, dark but hopeful: "I could not saw the fallen tree not all / of it had fallen because somehow each spring, / the rotted half still mysteriously bloomed."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This verse debut from novelist Bellows (On This Day) might look familiar to those who admire his fiction: it's clear, bleak, detailed, full of pathos and largely concerned with coming of age in rural Maine. Farms, forests and fields provide stark backgrounds for characters who struggle both to fit in with, and to stand apart from, their families: "We ate from the garden till it was spent, then/ threw its left-behinds at each other-failures/ still in their beds, scabbed over with saltmarsh hay." Such lines represent Bellows at his confident, articulate best, neither a rhyming formalist nor a plain-style writer, and one instead able to apply the resources of the American language to a frustration that seems peculiar to New England. Other work may sound too talky, or too close to prose, as in one of five poems based on paintings by Howard Pyle in which, "The captain will pay for his mistreatment of those who once admired him." Toward the end of the collection come poems set in Boston and New York, and poems about other paintings, poems whose sophistication makes Bellows sound happier, but perhaps less powerful. Long unrhymed lines link past to present, Winslow Homer to 21st-century Brooklyn, fashioning a style which may not seem entirely his own, but which should keep readers attentive anyway.
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Review

"Gripping... Why Speak? extends [Bellows'] fascination with childhood to a variety of landscapes, from a strangely disembodied farm to the paintings of Winslow Homer. The poems tell stories, but the book's power depends on the slow accumulation of an inner world." The New York Times Book Review" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (February 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393062406
• ISBN-13: 978-0393062403
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,831,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am the author of the novel, ON THIS DAY (HarperCollins 2003/2004; Harmon Blunt 2006) and a collection of poems, WHY SPEAK? (W.W. Norton 2007/2008). My short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Guernica, Post Road, Redivider, and The Best American Short Stories 2005, edited by Michael Chabon. I am currently working on a new novel--a contemporary ghost story set in coastal Maine--and a collection of linked stories that focus around a central character: a young woman named Nan who moves from rural Vermont to go to college in New York City in the wake of her brother's death. Three of the stories have been published so far, and one has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can find the published stories here: http://www.fictionaut.com/users/nathaniel-bellows

More about my writing, visual art, and music at my website: www.nathanielbellows.com.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid., January 7, 2011

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Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why Speak?: Poems (Paperback)

Nathaniel Bellows, Why Speak? (Norton, 2007)

It's obvious from the moment you open Why Speak? and start reading its first piece that Nathaniel Bellows is very, very good at what he does.

"From the highway I see the open, unknown field, two silos the same
battered blue, the sign with its white letters still singing the name

ALFALFA FARM. And next door, the house of an old friend, long gone,
now redone and different from how I knew it: raw, dug-up lawn,

cracked storm door, a van in the driveway balanced on blocks where
his sisters would play under a pile of ratty afghans...."
("Alfalfa Farm")

Everything that makes Nathaniel Bellows worth reading, and for that matter a lot of things that make most poetry worth reading, can be found in that passage. It's elevated language, the definition give to poetry by some luminary or other back in the day, but it's still recognizably English, with rhythm and ramble, that kind of storytelling quality that works really well in a good poem. It's got some fun wordplay ("the sign...still singing..."), keen observation, a sense of passing time. It's a poem that makes you want to keep going, and it opens a book that is remarkably consistent in providing poems that do the same.

This is not one to tear through; I kept going back to it, a poem or two at a time, over the course of a few weeks, letting it simmer piece by piece. An excellent book all the way around, and highly recommended. ****