Review of Melissa Kwasny's Reading Novalis in Montana

Nature is often the starting point of Melissa Kwasny’s introspection, but it’s certainly only one of many destinations. Like the poems in her previous books, Kwasny’s new collection, Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed Editions) is replete with a naturalist’s attention to detail and poems that are full of precise, often stark, imagery drawn from the world around us. But Kwasny’s no scientist; what’s most impressive about her work is how much she can extrapolate about the inner life from even the smallest natural details. The result is a book full of lyric meditations, meditations that put forward questions one can’t always answer, but as readers of Reading Novalis in Montana will see, this type of inquiry is an art unto itself.

The title poem (and the first poem in the book), “Reading Novalis in Montana” is a good example of this. Kwasny writes:

The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.

Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.

Then the brutal intervention of sound.

All that we experience is a message, he wrote.

I would like to know what it means

if first one bird swims the channel

across the classic V, the line flutters and the formation dissolves.

The diction and precision here is first-rate and reminiscent of other fine writers—Robert Bly’s Silence in the Snowy Fields and Barry Lopez’s non-fiction essays come to mind. And there’s no doubting the emotional authenticity of Kwasny’s observations; these are things you can feel in your chest. Just after these lines, we get the first mention of Novalis himself. Novalis, born Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg in 1772, was an early proponent of German Romanticism, which came about as a rejection of the ideals of the Enlightenment and especially its unyielding emphasis on reason, and its general disregard for the spiritual and the divine and the importance of personal, individual perception.

For Kwasny, Novalis is both a foil and a kindred spirit. She seems alternatively smitten by and skeptical of his wider worldview, but in terms of process, she shares a good deal of with Novalis, and this becomes clear in a selection from Pollen, Novalis’s collection of aphorisms, which was published in 1798. In it, he writes:

The first step is introspection—exclusive contemplation of the self. But whoever stops there only goes halfway. The second step must be genuine observation outward—spontaneous, sober observation of the external world.

The references to Novalis in the book therefore make a good deal of sense, as Kwasny’s work takes both of these steps, In fact, this is one aspect that makes the book worth reading, as this combination is rather rare in poetry today. (One usually finds that writers take only one step or the other.) Even so, taking both these steps doesn’t lead to many solutions or easy answers. Later in the title poem Kwasny writes:

Novalis wrote, and died, like Keats, before he was thirty.

They have left me behind like one of their lost,

scratching at the gravel in the fields. Where are they

once the sky has enveloped them?

There is no answer to that question; instead, like in Novalis’s work (especially Hymns to the Night), there is a strange mix of beauty amid sadness. This is where Kwasny, like James Wright, is particularly perceptive—Kwasny’s work is suffused with beauty, but she seems aware that beauty is a sliding scale—what we see is often a hard kind of beauty, and the sublime is never that far away.

She ends the title poem with the following:

If, as the Gnostics say, the world was a mistake

created by an evil demiurge, and I am trapped

in my body, abandoned by a god whom I long for as one of my own,

why not follow the tundra geese into their storm?

why stay while my great sails flap the ice

as if my voice were needed to call them back

in the spring, as if I were the lost dwelling place for the flocks?

Here again, the inner and outer worlds intertwine in a way that Novalis would be able to recognize and appreciate. The result is often complicated and produces more questions than answers, but readers will quickly see that the questions Kwasny asks are important, and certainly worth asking.

Get the book here.

Visit the publisher here.

Review of Tim Nolan's book, The Sound of It

The Sound of It by Tim Nolan

The Sound of It, Tim Nolan’s first book, is an accomplishment; the book exemplifies the craft at its finest, and its poems are fresh, funny, and most importantly, accessible—these are poems that your mother will understand and enjoy.

Nevertheless, this accessibility doesn’t make Nolan’s writing any less impressive—too often contemporary poetry seems almost intentionally esoteric. To be sure, in some circles, accessibility is sneered at and difficulty is synonymous with excellence. (I suppose we have T.S. Eliot and company to thank for that.)

Nolan’s poems are accessible in part because they deal with a variety of familiar subjects—everything from family life and love to writing about writing—and they are successful because they handle such subjects without getting maudlin—or worse—being too earnest.

The book has a machine-gun start in “Who I’m After”:

I’m after the Hittites, the Druids, the 1932

Yankees. I’m after Socrates, Ibsen, Shaw

(I was almost alive with Shaw). I’m after

Chekhov, the Poles who charged the German

tanks on horseback. I’m after the Greeks

who waited inside the horse at Troy.

I’m after those who lived through the

Potato Famine. I’m on the branch of the old tree

that survived. I’m after the stegosaurus.

I’m before Derek Jeter. I’m after Walt and Emily

and Abe. I’m after Mark Twain. I’m before Shania Twain.

I’m after Jerry Lewis—even if I die tomorrow—and he lives.

But with you—I’m before and after at once—

I can’t quite figure it out—it’s my breath—breathing

then—somehow—it ends up belonging to you.

The poem is fast, smart, and funny. And then there’ s the turn at the end and there Nolan is, writing successfully about writing—one of the hardest things to do. (Too often writing about writing seems self-indulgent or worse, plain damn boring.)

The last stanza of “Who I’m After” also introduces the reader to another aspect of Nolan’s work. He uses dashes. Lots of them. I’d seen Nolan read a number of times, but I didn’t see his work on the page until I read The Sound of It. When I first I saw his poems on the page, they reminded me of William Carlos Williams and the poems he dashed off on the back of prescriptions while he was out making house calls and delivering babies. For Williams, such intermittent work was a matter of necessity.

Nolan’s dashes are something else altogether, and they’re essential for an entirely different reason. Nolan’s dashes are conventional in that they redirect emphasis, but he’s not simply using them to highlight isolated phrases or clauses—instead, Nolan’s dashes propel the poem and redirect it. Like an engineer shoveling coal into an engine, each dash gives the poem new energy, and potentially a new direction.

The first three stanzas of the book’s title poem are a good example of this:

I thought of something today that I thought

would lead me into something—not a poem—

necessarily—but some insight that I could

tell someone else—as in a joke or a quip

such as the last words of Oscar Wilde—

“Either the wallpaper goes or I go.”—something

lasting that might be repeated and would

carry a life of its own

The dashes in this poem let us see the genesis of an idea, and the dashes make a good deal of sense here, as thought—and life, generally—almost always comes in bits and pieces. And that is what the book is really about; more often than not, Nolan’s poems puzzle over and revel in the strange ways that everyday life is transmitted from person to person. In this respect, Nolan’s book is simultaneously a story of a life and an exploration of how living actually occurs; because of this focus, Nolan’s poems commonly feature events from everyday life—they almost have to—and any event, however seemingly trivial, can enter his work: from driving his daughter and her friends home from the movies to a simple gesture passed between a father and son at a baseball game. In this respect, he reminds the reader of William Carlos Williams and Richard Hugo, writers who wrote about just about anything, from Williams’ famous poem about plums (“This is Just To Say”) to Hugo’s poem about a softball tournament (“Missoula Softball Tournament”).

His poem, “Wealth” is a good example of this:

Down the block a garage band plays

“Isn’t She Lovely”—here’s a kind of wealth

Even if the song is fractured—and listening

tonight to the sequence of birds—I mean

their unintended consequences—is wealth

It’s these unintended consequences that make Nolan’s book so worthwhile, as the reader gets a glance at how moments in one life come together and how one thing, however strange, can lead to another. This is something that most people can appreciate, especially when conveyed with Nolan’s skill.

Get the book here, or visit the publisher here: www.newriverspress.com