SOME ETHER
Poems by Nick Flynn. Graywolf Press, June 2000, Reviewed by Tony Hoagland.
Someday the term confessional will seem as quaint and obsolete as a fainting couch, and we will have a new terminology, one that feels more discriminating. In the meantime, we have Nick Flynn’s compelling poems, which turn some rather extreme autobiographical details of a life this way and that, like a snow globe in the hand of the dazed survivor of a battle. Dazed but curious, connected but detached, attentive but distant, present but disturbingly enmeshed in the long sticky tentacles of memory. The poems of Flynn’s first book, Some Ether, revolve around the central story of a mother’s suicide and the traumatized, dreamy disconnectedness of her survivor. But the book’s gift is not the sensationalism of the tale, but the delicate kiltered skill with which the poems collage anecdote and metaphor into allegory: “Every day, something—this time / a French ship with all her passengers and crew / slides into the North Sea, the water so cold / it finishes them. Nothing saved / but a life ring stenciled GRACE, / cut loose from its body. / A spokesman can only / state his surprise / that it doesn’t happen more often. / . . . For years I had a happy childhood, / if anyone asked I’d say, it was happy” (“The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands”).I’ve been reading these poems in magazines for years, and still find great freshness in Flynn’s arrangement of images, and especially the elegant, unwinding syntax of certain poems (“Flood,” “How Do You Know You’re Missing Anything?”). More and more, though, I’ve come to realize how much this collection is concerned not just with memory, but with the subtleties and paradoxes of telling itself. The crucial dilemma for the speaker comes to see how loyalty to the dead prevents ever living fully in the present. How the stories we most treasure are addictive as heroin is treated in “Cartoon Physics, Part II”: “More than once / I traded on this until it transmuted into story . . . / I’d recite it as if I’d never told anyone, / and it felt that way / because I’d try not to cry yet always / would & the listener /would always hold me . . .”One of the therapeutic premises of confessionals, of course, is that earnest speech is a healing act. One of the integrities of
Flynn’s book is that it doesn’t make any such promise. There is no clear indication that the speaker’s damage can be triumphed over—no promise that any of us recover from anything. “Emptying Town” is just one refutation of the confessional mode: “You know the way Jesus / rips open his shirt / to show us his heart, all flaming and thorny, / the way he points to it. . . . / My version of hell / is someone ripping open his / shirt & saying, / look what I did for you.” Some Ether combines nakedness, elegance, and emotional intelligence. The poems are beautifully clear in their particulars and meanings. And the question of whether or not the speaker can awaken from the dream of the past, whether telling can affect this self-redemption, whether confession works, is a deeply affecting drama.
Wiman, Christian-- Source: Poetry; Nov2001, Vol. 179 Issue 2, p95-96, 2p
Nick Flynn differs from Gjertrud Schnackenberg in that his poems are almost exclusively personal (even his second- and third-person poems feel like necessary, but palpable, deflections), and he differs from Christine Garren in that he has no idiosyncratic style. The passions and perceptions of these poems are sometimes original and usefully disturbing, but the way these poems occur, both in their general construction as well as that whole weave of cadence and silence that we call a "voice," is familiar. All the poems are in free verse. Anecdotes and narrative passages that threaten to dissolve into prose are stitched together with striking images, one of which usually concludes each poem in a ramifying, show-don't-tell sort of way that no one could accuse of being "closure." Indeed, poems written in this style live or die by the strength of their images. Flynn's are alive, because his gift in this regard is considerable.
Her teeth
float, lit by the radio dial, her shoes
line the floor of her closet,
a bodiless army ready to march.
WILD WITH DANDELIONS AND ROSES
I don't want
to remember her
reaching up for a kiss, or the television
pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom.
MEMENTO MORI
how overnight we could be orphaned
& the world become a bell we'd crawl inside
& the ringing all we'd eat.
SUDDEN
All of these seem quite good to me, but the last one, with its recurrent iambic beat broken only by the opening anapests of the second and third lines, feels qualitatively different, carved in the air and ear in a way that suddenly seems stranger, more permanent.
A blurb on the back compares Flynn, with some accuracy, to Plath, but Plath was more technically accomplished than Flynn, as well as being ruthless in ways that he is not (as a poet, I mean). Even at her most apparently intimate, it's hard to get a fix on the personality behind a Plath poem. Certainly she never feels "sensitive." With Flynn you sometimes feel your response going through a poem to the sensibility behind it. That's no small accomplishment, because it's genuine emotion and never pity that you feel (Flynn is never manipulative or exploitive), but it's not the same sort of accomplishment that Plath manages. The self is in some way burned into and out of her best poems; you feel that she would sacrifice anything, be it the "truth" of the poem's occasion or some dimension of her response to it, to get the sound right, the craft. That's what I mean by ruthless.
Some Ether is a book filled with highly charged subject matter--a mother's suicide, various other deaths, lovemaking-but for me the most disturbing, and in a way the bravest, poem is "Cartoon Physics, Part 2," in which Flynn questions the integrity or authenticity of his own feeling, admits the way he's used it as a story. It's not as well-written a poem as others in the book (the imagery midway through becomes vague and confused), but it does have a different, self-lacerating sort of charge to it. Perhaps for imaginative people, the poem suggests, there is always a theatrical and self-dramatizing quality to tragedy, and the greatest danger for those of us who turn our sorrows into stories may be self aggrandizing grief.
Reviewing this book, which has moved me despite my puckered temper, has reminded me of a comment Randall Jarrell once made that if a critic praised more than three or four living poets you knew he had lousy taste, because no more than that were going to last. True enough, I guess, though it seems to me that there might be other virtues, as well as other standards of judgment, besides durability. That is, perhaps there is a whole range of art that speaks only to its own moment but speaks truly. And maybe in this sense it's no great fault to love a hundred poets. I don't, as it happens, and sometimes--reading through a stack of recent books, say--suspect that I don't even like poetry. It's a relief, then, to come upon a poet as passionate, sharp-eyed, and humane as Flynn, and find that I do.
