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.)
