In the classic Empathy
(1989), Berssenbrugge made inquiries into the ways sentences constitute perceptions and form the boundaries of worlds by sculpting them into impossibly long-lined verses. Four Year Old Girl
(1998) marked a shift to hemistitch-like lines where each sentence stands by itself, seeming to accrue as thought and perceptions do. Nest
further refines that style into an almost diaristic directness and descriptive bluntness: one poem begins "We're in New Mexico," while another opens "The photograph is handsome of the young man," and a third "I'm so pleased to be friends with Maryanne, though I don't understand how she has time for me, with her many friends." These intentionally scaled-down beginnings develop, with demanding elegance and unerring pace, into scenes where the speaker seems to quietly reflect those around her, as in Chantal Akerman's film Les Rendez-Vous d'Anna
. And as in that film, the maintenance of such spaces seems to require a lot of leisure, as the speaker repeatedly takes "all morning to lounge in bed, talk on the phone, read the paper," while deliveries of flowers arrive, last night's parties are picked over, and "a jade ring is endowed with depth with stories of Grandmother's connoisseurship." Yet it is not languor or money that give this book depth, but rather their teller's ease in turning them around with statements like "I... accept my old relative whose memories are sentimental and impure" or "A sense of deferral has been added to this weave of naiveté, humor, fragility, but our relation has, in fact, ended." Anyone who has a family or friends will relate. (Nov.)
