Dead Reckoning

Dead Reckoning, by Jude Nutter. Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2021. 93 pp. $14.95 (paperback)

            Jude Nutter’s “Disco Jesus and the Wavering Virgins in Berlin, 2011” is a poem I wanted to read again as soon as I reached the last line. I wanted to see how a poem with such a mundane beginning– the speaker sits in the dark, on a rainy night in Berlin, watching TV evangelists – could accumulate so much imaginative force over the next seven pages. The evangelist evokes a world in which we are all “assailed by carnality”:

                                                . . . Let us pray, he says,
for the wavering virgins. Now I say
it is the poet’s duty to wait,
to wait in the dark, to wait in the dark

at the world’s mercy
for moments such as this. In the beginning
is the word. And the word
is sex. In the beginning is the kiss

that gives rise to the myth of Eden – that bright
landscape unfettered by history . . . (p. 18)

            As a strobe light flashes across a life-sized Jesus, the speaker is back in the German Youth Club discos of her youth and then to the beginning of her sexual life. Working on a farm to earn money for college, she and the farmer’s thirty-something son have sex on Sunday mornings – when the man’s parents are, of course, in church. Suddenly “. . . the world/is just as it was, only more so,” and she learns “that the body/is its own reward.”

            Up to this point, the poem has followed a familiar trajectory: a moment in time opens up on a long-ago landscape. But then we are back on Linienstrasse in Berlin: “A great city/and its troubled history under rain./The whole of Europe under the same rain.” And the speaker remembers reading that a waver is a young tree left standing when a piece of wooded land is cleared. An image of rain drumming on rows of trees brings more etymologies: human from the Latin, meaning earth, and flesh from the Greek, meaning earthly. And so:

                                                                      . . . Every word
for what we are brings us back to the dirt. So yes, I say,

let us pray. Let there be buttons
abandoning their buttonholes. Let tongues unbuckle,
let watches, let belts. May small change fallen
from pockets be forgotten, never found.

And shy flags of hair swing loose. Storms
inside strokes of wind. The world is full
of alchemy, so let there be questions
and demands. Small talk, dirty talk, language

in all denominations. Let keys drop and fingers find
every latch and lock and legs peel free
from the sheer, long throats of stockings. Let hearts
be up to their necks in longing. (p. 22)

            Do you hear an echo of “turbulent, fleshy, sensual” Walt Whitman, in Part XXIV of “Song of Myself”? (“Unscrew the locks from the doors!/Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”) That connection would not be lost on Nutter: her 2009 collection from Notre Dame Press was entitled, I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman. (The recent poem, “Still Life with Hand Grenades and Tulips,” continues that volume’s meditations on the unthinkable dimensions of the last century’s wars: much of an entire generation slaughtered in the name of colonial greed and national pride.)

            Nutter’s work is new to me, but she has been publishing poetry collections since 2002, and her poetry has won numerous awards; this is her fourth book of poems. Born in North Yorkshire in 1960, Nutter grew up near Hanover, in northern Germany. She studied printmaking at Britain’s Winchester School of Art and then earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Oregon and now lives and works in the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota.

            Several poems in this new collection describe scenes from Nutter’s childhood; the most striking is “64 Unbekannte Tote: Photograph, Germany 1970” (Unbekannte Tote means “unidentified dead” in German.) As a child, Nutter lived in a building on the NATO military base that had been a hospital for the 60,000 people interred at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

            The poem describes a photograph taken of Nutter as a girl, standing next to a snowman she has made and squinting into the winter sun. She does not know that beneath her feet are the bones of 64 people, whose remains will not be found until nearly 50 years later and whose identity is still unknown. They are believed to be men, women and children from Bergen-Belsen, who died there or at the wartime hospital:

But for now she is a child

so in love with the world: ground beetle,
copper, clouded apollo; wood wasp, fritillary,
alpine argus. And she does not know it yet,
of course, but this girl will one day become
your most valuable lost possession: this girl
bludgeoned by sunlight, with a heart

like a beetle under bark, in a world
where death has not yet connected the dream
and the dwelling place. (p. 66)

            Here the influences I detect are Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney: the loving care with which the butterfly varieties (“copper, clouded apollo; fritillary/alpine argus”) are named, and a diction in which the intimate and the elevated are intertwined.

            The most memorable poems in this book are the ones about Nutter’s parents, to whom this collection is dedicated. (The book’s title appears to refer both to her attempt to come to grips with their deaths and to the literal meaning of the term, dead reckoning: navigation by calculating one’s position based on the direction of travel and elapsed time.) In “The Shipping Forecast,” the speaker moves back and forth effortlessly between memories of listening to the BBC’s legendary nightly report of coastal weather with her mother and the last days of her mother’s life. When the speaker was a child, her mother would remind the family that worse things happen at sea, and the speaker would relish her snug place at home:

Sheeted and safely tucked in to the dark’s

back pocket, I would dream of great trawlers
moving, inevitably, into fearsome weather.
The chewed edge of a bow wave,

and a handful of following gulls cuffed
back and forth through night’s black wall
into the reach of the running lights . . . (pp. 29-30)

             But the speaker’s mother is no longer safe in her life on land: “She is a few days out/from death. We know it. Without knowing/we know it.” Confined to bed, she struggles in the only way she now can – with her hands. Her husband tries to calm her; the speaker tries to calm her, by combing her hair. But her hands are “determined, insistent, like the muscled heave/of water, like a wave . . .”

until they can struggle no longer:

I shall remember how I was grateful

for every hour death kept us waiting.
I shall remember how when her hand fell still
I missed its movement. Pale flag

of an overrun country. How even my father’s hands
could not calm her. How I did not brush
the fine waves of my mother’s hair enough. (p. 33)

            This poem is followed  by “Ianua: Day Zero plus Three,” a companion-piece about her father’s death, composed in the same three-line stanzas and written with the same bravery and tenderness. (Ianua is a Latin word meaning “passageway”; it derives from Ianus, the name of the Romans’ two-faced god. Throughout the book, Nutter associates the word with the passageway from life to death.)

            Other poems here that I will go back to include “Fossil Hunting at John Lennon Airport, Liverpool,” a narrative that moves with the assurance of a good short story; “Field Notes: Watching the Crew of Atlantis Renovating the Hubble Telescope,” which juxtaposes astronauts floating weightlessly and Nutter and her father as they hover around her mother’s sick-bed; and “The Lions of Chauvet,” which also juxtaposes two realities: children fascinated by a lion at the zoo with the Paleolithic paintings of lions and other animals recently discovered on the walls of a cave in the Ardèche region of southern France. (These are the artworks shown in Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.)

            Many kinds of poetry are flourishing in the United States today; if anyone wonders whether the nation’s formalist tradition, including the work of Bishop, Lowell, and Wilbur, is still robust and relevant, they should read this book. If any young writers aspire to add to that tradition, here’s a master class.

            In the latter half of “The Lions of Chauvet,” Nutter focuses on the hand of one of the artists: the hand with a little kink in one finger, so that now we can follow its handprints through the cave, some 30 millennia later. She believes that the hand “was our very first symbol/for that need felt inside the body/for something beyond the body.” That brings her to the single, flowing line of ochre running above the contour of striding lion and lioness on the cave’s wall:

  . . . I say

this line is evidence of love
in its purest form: the heart teaching the hand
what to put in, what to leave out: I say

someone witnessed, and understood, the third
animal these lions dragged into the world

in the wake of their affection. Because these lions
have been abstracted into life by the prayer
of attention. Their bodies are touching as they walk. (pp. 60-61)

—Reviewer Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger recently published Anneliese's House, their translation of Lou Andreas-Salomé's 1921 novel, with Camden House Books.