A Country of Strangers
A Country of Strangers. New and Selected Poems, by D. Nurkse. Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. 286 pp. $35.00 (hardcover)
Given the fraught social, political, and cultural climate of the last six years, it would be difficult to think of a more succinct characterization of contemporary America than the title of D. Nurkse's latest book, A Country of Strangers. Gallup polls find that Americans' trust in their fellow citizens' ability to make judgments in a democracy has been declining steadily since the 1970s, while sociologists research the isolating effects of the COVID-19 shutdowns, social media, and ideological polarization in contributing to a deepening sense of alienation, a growing and uncomfortable distance between individuals as well as between groups. But then, how can we apprehend, let alone comprehend, the full measure of those around us when our fields of vision narrow to the width of an iPhone screen and our attention spans fragment into 280-character squibs.
For Brooklyn poet and human rights activist D. Nurkse, this sense of separation is not new, and though the degree of its intensity may ebb and flow in rhythms that parallel the historical events of one's time, and though it's thwarted more often than not, the fundamental desire for meaningful connection with others is a constant of the human experience. This generous retrospective of Nurkse's work — with selections ranging from his 1988 chapbook Isolation in Action through 2012's A Night in Brooklyn plus twenty-nine new poems — documents the passage of a quiet American life moved to speech by generation-defining events such as the Vietnam war, 9/11, and the troubling resurgence of authoritarian forces, all coexisting with the personal tragedies and epiphanies that shape one's inner life. Beneath the plain-spoken surfaces of Nurkse's lyrics, readers may well hear the echo of E.M. Forster's famous directive to "Only connect" one's inner and outer life in order to become whole.
For Nurkse, the poem itself is the connective mechanism, a personalized global positioning system that facilitates the integration of private and public experience. While most poets would acknowledge that their work reaches toward a similar goal, Nurkse adds an unusual aura, a filmy membrane of surrealism that serves to privilege the interiority of his vision while still pointing to the shadows of recognizable external events: bombings, demonstrations, police brutality, state-sanctioned repression. Although concrete images abound, they become artifactual remnants of a totality or shattering experience whose emotional aftermath can't be measured in conventional terms, as in "The Reunification Center," a recollection of the days following 9/11:
Evian:
M&Ms, which we tried to hand out
in that cordoned-off street
where an ambulance chugged empty:
and each stranger refused, a little pained,
no, no, I'm here to help: we offered aspirin,
stock certificates, a child's rocking horse,
a teddy bear with an empty eye socket,
but no one consented to receive that treasure:
Beginning with the expected supplies given to those in need after a disaster — bottled water, casseroles, aspirin — the proffered items grow ever more useless and strange, reflecting the relief workers' desperate desire to assist others in the face of insurmountable tragedy as they try to work through their own traumas.
Whether writing of his childhood neighborhood, or of the intimate milestones of marriage, parenthood, and illness, Nurkse attempts to locate the resonant if transient moments of hardship and loss that connect us to each other as people inhabiting a shared reality. What we may more often discover, though, is "the loneliness between words," the inexpressible arm's-length between our innermost selves and the world outside, as well as our inability to know for sure whether connecting the two is possible. A recent poem, "Marriage in the Mountains," illustrates how the sheer transience of human life and memory may eventually diminish the reality of even the most significant events in one's life:
I was married to a murmur,
shrug, a quarter-turn,
an exhale, a pirouette —
pledged to a head of dew
flashing in a cobweb,
to the luminous faintly hairy
inner side of a beech leaf.
Only a few more summers
in her high country
of terraced copses,
lime kilns, knots of hardwood.
I belonged in the world
like a pinecone or passing cloud.
For all its photographic imagery of the Vermont flora and landscape, this poem, like "The Reunification Center," sidesteps the solidity of human presence, recalling instead its phantom gestures and extending that ephemerality to the speaker himself. Because they "speak" the symbolic language of the interior, these incidentals are inscribed within the memory more deeply than the "she" who catalyzed their recall, leading the speaker to locate his own existence on the same plane as the other things of this world, no matter how great or small, animate or inanimate. In a similar vein, the poem "Early Morning, Late Summer, Unmade Bed" evokes an awareness of how human consciousness will presumptively take center stage relative to everything around it:
Remember the suffering of this pronoun I,
how this vowel was slighted and betrayed,
how this letter undressed and lay awake
until dawn, when even the logy oaks
were overburdened with the Self.
The poem ends with a yearning to be decentered, to banish the tyranny of ego in a moment of intimacy with another:
Take your sharp pencil, love, and erase me
from the top down, leaving a smudge
to darken between the naked sleepers.
And yet, the world exists, and for better or worse, human beings bear responsibility for its well-being, particularly the well-being of its inhabitants, and it's in this nexus that the poet finds purpose and meaning. Though Nurkse had once served on the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA and has taken part in demonstrations throughout his life ("I bragged of all the rallies / I'd been to since childhood, / all the arrests and gassings / and only a few were lies."), his poems are less overtly political than one might expect from an engaged activist. They neither attempt to persuade nor argue for specific causes, and while many reference demonstrations ("G.E. Nonviolent Action"), the witnessing of social injustice ("A Vagrant"), and state-sanctioned wrongdoing ("The Checkpoints"), their function is primarily contextual, providing a blueprint for the labyrinth of human affairs through which the poet finds — or may fail to find — a singular, personal connection with his times. In the final stanza of the prose poem "Not Yet America," he writes:
Apparently we'll always have to march, singing to keep awake, calling "peace" and "justice" as if those sibilants could answer: in the numbing cold, even in the night sky, in the empty quadrant of Scorpio.
There you'll find us, and street too, since it stretches forever. A bodega with steel gates. A Jiffy Lube. A chain-link fence on which a child has spray-painted the first stroke of the first letter of a name.
The first letter of that name may be D or N, or any that leaves a fragile trace of what Shakespeare imagined when he wrote "And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name." In the subtle dialectic between personal and public life that runs through A Country of Strangers, Nurkse names "A local habitation" that retains the strangeness of an "airy nothing."
—Reviewer Fred Muratori's three full-length poetry collections are Despite Repeated Warnings, The Spectra, and A Civilization. His poems and short prose have recently appeared in Redivider, Cloudbank, The American Journal of Poetry, and Gargoyle.
