Book Review: THE NERVE OF IT by Lynn Emanuel
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The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected by Lynn Emanuel |
| University of Pittsburgh Pres, 2015 $16.95 |
As a younger poet beginning her career, I’m interested in the process seasoned writers undergo when compiling a new and selected. Can the inclusion of older poems be likened to a band playing that first single, ten years later, at the encore of every show? Are the ghosts of who we were, at least as artists, a burden to bear? Or are the words a reassuring reminder that we’ve changed at all? I may never know my own answers to these questions unless I’m one day lucky enough to have a similar project. But here’s what I do know: Lynn Emanuel embraces these disparate spaces of time. Instead of arranging chronologically, The Nerve of It is based on “linkage” and “collision.” Old poems nestle against the spine of new poems, the new poems sparking fresh context and narrative through the words we’ve read and loved. This re-imagining gives a real pulse to this collection, as Emanuel points out “This is the wonderful thing about art / It can bring back the dead.”
Art as a medium of expression, as well as the work of the poet, is a major thread here. From the first page we are met with a poem titled “Out of Metropolis,” which details a train trip into the heart of America. The first stanza lures us with romantic images of the Midwest:
We want cottages, farmhouses
with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds;
we want the golden broth of sunlight ladled over
ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow.
But in the second stanza we experience a shift in tone. Our visions are broken. Suddenly, urbanization pops our country bubble with “a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb,” and “the street lights on their long stems.” A second train fades into the distance and “there is a name strolling cross the landscape in the crisply voluminous / script of the opening credits, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though / it were the author of this story.” At this point, I wonder if Emanuel is talking about the train anymore or the scene outside the window. That maybe, instead, this is the journey of the poet; we must imagine beauty where it has long ago fled. Or, as writers, we are often disappointed by the real world in comparison to our own creations. Perhaps Emanuel is suggesting both.
Another poem that stands out in this collection is “Frying Trout While Drunk.” Though an older poem, it still remains a bright light in contemporary poetry. Here we are witness to a mother struggling with alcohol and a speaker who locates herself within this addiction. The images have not wilted over the years; “In his Nash Rambler, its dash / where her knees turned green,” “The trout with a belly white as my wrist,” “Buttons ticking like seeds spit on a plate.” And probably most famously:
She is a beautiful, unlucky woman
In love with a man of lechery so solid
You could build a table on it
And when you did the blues would come to visit.
In these lines we are reminded of why Emanuel has a new and selected. And tomorrow, when I cringe at what I’ve written today, I’ll think of the trout frying and know, eventually, I’ll find the right words, because,
A new planet bloomed above us; in its light
The stumps of cut pine gleamed like dinner plates.
The world was beginning all over again, fresh and hot;
We could have anything we wanted.