The Border Kingdom (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Nurkse's ninth book takes its title from the Latin origin of limbo (limbus, hem or border). As the second kingdom (after Heaven), it edges on paradise; in Nurkse's hands, limbo is obsessed with various borders—dusk, dawn, border towns, a fall out shelter. A group of 9/11 poems reveals a devastating divide between before and after, as horrors are captured in lovely, if prose-like, descriptions: We filled the streets,/ squinting upward, shading our eyes,/ searching for the towers,/ or more planes, or rescue choppers,/ and a great silence built.... The first section contains biblical persona poems. In the more directly personal poems in the next two sections—The Limbo of the Fathers and The Limbo of the Children—Nurkse, also a writer on human rights issues, truly plumbs the depths of his muse. In beautiful, effortless lines, Nurkse discusses family, love, sex and children. In Return to Underhill Road, he employs his most affecting language to describe an ordinary family, in an ordinary home, experiencing something universal and timeless: the child in the next room/ swathed in her crib/ makes every sign in every alphabet/ and sings every sound in every language/ until it will become a story—// two rooms, one marriage, / this trance, happiness. (Aug.)
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Product Description

In a collection of urgent and intimate poems, D. Nurkse explores the biblical past and the terrifying politics of the present with which it resonates, the legacy of fathers and the flawed kingdoms they leave their sons.

In “Ben Adan,” a stunning poem in the opening sequence of the collection, we witness the stirring drama between a captor and the prisoner commanded to dig his own grave (“perhaps in a moment / he will lift me up / and hold me trembling, / more scared than I / and more relieved”). “After a Bombing” examines children’s drawings as deep symbolic reactions to 9/11. The subtly majestic “Lament for the Makers of Brooklyn” builds the poignant case for a lost world: “Where is Policastro the locksmith now?” the poet asks. “Half-blind, he wore two pairs of glasses / held together by duct tape, / . . . / afterward the key turned / for you but not for me.”

A poet of unique force and sensitivity, Nurkse refuses to pass over the marginal characters and corners of the world, attuned to the scraps of beauty or insight they might offer up in the midst of moral darkness. In The Border Kingdom he has given us an exceptionally powerful collection of poems—unfailingly rich in imagery, undaunted in subject and spirit.

Jericho

Sometimes in a high window
a white curtain knotted against itself

gives a glimpse of the lovers
as they were before the war:

with great concentration and silence
they undo a mother-of-pearl snap

while a cat perched on the sill
looks down with burning eyes.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307268020
• ISBN-13: 978-0307268020
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #82,887 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No Borders to this Kingdom, October 21, 2008

By	Michael Salcman (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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?