O Y S T E R B O Y R E V I E W [ 7 ] |
A L I F E B Y W A T E R
Crossing Water. Reviewed by Jeffery Beam
Nash grew up in North Carolina and spent summers on the Outer Banks where sand, water, flora, and fauna burn at noonday, where a "bearded / crusted hull slams through murderous waters." As in these words, the gentility in her poems always foreshortens through "not a real dark, just an edging away / from the rising sun." It's this Gothic tension familiar to Faulkner, McCullers, and O'Connor that keeps putting sand in your mouthand allows the ocean, its "blue ketch," its "Cold Beer / Live Bait / Video Rentals / Jesus Saves," its "onlookers stand[ing] / cold-eyed as birds" to counterweight the familiar with a consciously spirited, but not artificial, rebellion against Southern reticence toward self-revelation. There are poems here, too, of art, music, home, and children: "plates on the cherry tablecloth / under the wan bulb" and "this thick, slow-rising loaf of self / marked with contentment / as a leopard with its spots." Four poems, in particular, stand out. "Res poetica" in which a "ravenous" "they" "feed at night" with "huge eyes" and "do not remember the rain forest." "Singing Bach" in which the poet's song (Nash is also a singer) becomes a strenuous climb up Alp-like mountains to find "chambered nautilus, tiny shrimp / minutely hinged and plated, / fossils of feather-feelered thousand-legged / ocean crawlers"a representative example of Nash's flexible, careening vocabulary. My favorite poem "Copperhead," as "forthright and clear / as "common script / scribbled on the ground." The epiphanic grace of "Benediction": "When you have lived so long in a dry climate / . . . you no longer look at the sky." And "Desire" manifesting as a "huge cat / rough-tongued / his loud breath sour as sickness." Something here conjures a splendid hybrid of Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton. These poems I have added to my lock box under the stars. They will undo the lock themselves and rumble through the house on unwritten occasions when the intellect and soul require a friend.
"Now We Both Have Dreams of Drowning" a poem from Florence Nash's Crossing Water.
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