The official poet laureate of Brooklyn, Nurkse (The Rules of Paradise) has long held a small but loyal readership for his short, quiet poems about dreams, griefs, childhood recollections and surprising urban scenes. This eighth book is his first from a major trade press. It puts the simplicities, short lines and slight surrealisms Nurkse has long used into the work of mourning: most of the poems concern Nurkse's late father, whom he recalls sometimes as a voice from his childhood, sometimes in his last years, and sometimes as a presence from beyond the grave. Often beginning as anecdotes, many slow-paced poems here coalesce around some totemic object or common noun: "shadow," "wind," "dawn," "stone," "body." These tactics suggest, at various points, Robert Bly, Charles Simic and Stanley Kunitz as they were in the late 1960s and '70s; their earlier styles seem closer to Nurkse than Nurkse is to most work now. Sometimes (as with Simic) Nurkse conjures up stark symbolic street corners for his allegories of loss; at other times, they converge at "an imaginary fixed point/ in Flatbush or Central Brooklyn." Though he is most original when least dependent on autobiography, Nurkse concludes with a series of deeply sad poems set in a hospital, or hospitals, where the dramas of serious illness take place, "night after night." Nurkse's moving if sometimes stolid poems of memory also include a Schwinn bicycle, a "First Date" and subsequent romances, and several games of baseball: playing "Left Field," Nurkse's speaker "was proudest of my skill/ at standing alone in the darkness." (Sept.)
Forecast:While offering few surprises, these solid poems of mourning should find their audience, especially if displayed with grief- and illness-related nonfiction. Look for a few prize nominations that will work to acknowledge Nurkse's steady, lower-profile output along with this title.
