A Country of Strangers

Reviewed by: A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems by D. Nurkse Alice-Catherine Carls D. Nurkse A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems New York. Knopf. 2022. 286 pages. AT THE CORE of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, is a double (external/internal) exile that causes the poet to periodically absent himself from himself, others, and the world. The poet suffers from a "pain of nothing" and is unsure of its own existence: "Turn and face yourself / if there is a self." He sees life "like water in cupped hands" and himself as a passing cloud, a pine cone, a nonfinite being afflicted with the "suffering of this pronoun I." Love is not immune to this. The force that attracts soon estranges and, like a kerf, stresses the foreignness of bodies and minds—an apocalypse waiting to punish a transgressive act. It is Tristan and Isolde's dream of a lifetime of normal happiness while facing punishment. The tension between their longing for innocence lost and the subversiveness of their love is matched by God's helplessness not to love them: Doesn't God love thembecause they are like him,too broken to obeythe rules of death?("The Living Spring") The poet also shuttles back and forth between his poetic world and reality and lives life through a glass prism or behind a white curtain, something that Joanna Pollakówna defined as a shadow descending between reality and the image created from it. When emerging from his inner world of reflections and connections, the poet shows an "extraordinary grasp and insight, uttered with an uneven vigor sometimes exasperating, seemingly wayward, but really unsought and inevitable," which takes one's breath away. These words, used by Thomas Wentworth Higginson to describe Emily Dickinson's poetry, apply to D. Nurkse as well, as both share an ability to seize an illuminating instant from which springs the full poem. Such flashes of reality establish a balance between the poet's inner world and the real world and reconcile intuition and intellect. Nurkse's sense of human fragility is expressed through a flexible writing palette (Japanese renga, concrete poetry, lyrical poetry, street language), an international set of places (Estonia, Brooklyn, Armorique, Canaan, Rome, or the imaginary Olmos), and a cultural universe ranging from the troubadours to Freud, World War II, nuclear physics, and current events. [End Page 59] Rife with connections and reflections, such poetry prolongs words into silence. In an interview for American Life in Poetry, the poet said that the double space between stanzas "comes at you from different sides and has a great deal of resonance." It is a place "to put the narrative elements" of the poem. In so doing, the poet creates another layer of meaning. He enshrines intimate and political vignettes into poetic myths and inscribes culture and language in the palimpsest of history. In his most recent poems, the Covid pandemic experience of the past two years appears not as raw depression or anger but as a watermark in history's cabinet of horrors. Aphorisms unite transient detail and cosmic eternity. "God's silence / is the silence of a cricket"; parenthood is defined as "to wait all our lives / for a single moment." With the humbleness of one who senses that everything has already been said and done, Nurkse embroiders the world's multimillenarian human opus with metamythical variations on existential longings: birth, childhood's innocence, love, justice, violence, passion, loneliness, and the mysteries of the untamed mind. He loans his voice to a cloud of witnesses, loved ones and strangers alike; he reverses linear modernity to conjure past voices from "signs on the blank page," in order to erase oblivion and stimulate imagination. If his portraits of humans probe the untamed regions of the mind, his portraits of places map geographical and cultural borders with an obsessive longing, as in his long paean to Brooklyn, "A Night in Brooklyn," where ghosts and neighborhoods parade in freeze-frames. Nurkse, who admits to writing slowly, is in fact a tireless writer. Through his forty-year career, he has published poems in English and in translation in seventy-seven magazines from

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