Dennis Nurkse Livres

From the award-winning poet: a powerful collection that explores the biblical past and the terrifying politics of the present, the legacy of fathers and the flawed kingdoms they leave their sons. Now in paperback. In "Ben Adan," a stunning poem in the opening sequence of the collection, we witness the drama between a captor and the prisoner commanded to dig his own grave ("perhaps in a moment / he will lift me up / and hold me trembling, / more scared than I / and more relieved"). "After a Bombing" examines children's drawings as deep symbolic reactions to 9/11. The subtly majestic "Lament for the Makers of Brooklyn" builds the poignant case for a lost world: "Where is Policastro the locksmith now?" the poet asks. "Half-blind, he wore two pairs of glasses / held together by duct tape, / . . . / afterward the key turned / for you but not for me." In exploring the small empires of human conflict, which expand in all directions, Nurkse is attuned to the scraps of beauty or insight that marginal characters and corners of the world might offer up in the midst of moral darkness. With The Border Kingdom, he has given us a collection unfailingly rich in imagery, undaunted in subject and spirit.

In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart's hidden stories.D. Nurkse's immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child's dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy's baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s ("Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness"). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage ("We showed her daylight in our cupped hands"), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities ("but on the streets / there was no one"), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens.Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists--birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers--and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.

A contemporary requiem--an earthy yet elegant reconsideration of the Tristan and Iseult story, from the former poet laureate of Brooklyn. In D. Nurkse's wood of Morois, the Forest of Love, there's a fine line between the real and the imaginary, the archaic and the actual, poetry and news. The poems feature the voices of the lovers and all parties around them, including the servant Brangien; Tristan's horse, Beau Joueur; even the living spring that flows through the tale ("in my breathing shadow / the lovers hear their voices / confused with mine / promising a slate roof, / a gate, a child . . . "). Nurkse brings us an Iseult who has more power than she wants over Tristan's imagination, and a Tristan who understands his fate early on: "That charm was so strong, no luck could free us." For these lovers, time closes like a book, but it remains open for us as we hear both new tones and familiar voices, eerily like our own, in this age-old story made new again.