A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems
304A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems
304Hardcover
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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780593321409 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 04/19/2022 |
Pages: | 304 |
Sales rank: | 1,167,861 |
Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.53(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Country of Strangers: New Poems
Order to Dispersefor the students
Tonight my children are facing live ammunition.
One holds a rock, one brought a Bible, one hides a phone.
The fires of the provocateurs burn so brightly.
The police put duct tape over their badges.
The soldiers are hooded; they wear no insignia.
Last night they had rubber bullets, tonight hollow-point.
In the smoke you see the outlines of a bank, a cathedral,
absent as the profiles of Presidents on coins.
A voice advances, a voice retreats, someone aims.
Have you ever died in a dream? What happened then?
Tell me what happened! There is only one life.
How long will I hold mine like water in cupped hands?
The Detentions
In death too there are great cities, streets of padlocked binderies under rain that tastes of piss, cathedrals with bricked-in windows, garages lit by droplights, tenements with narrow stairs covered by linoleum treads worn smooth as the ball of a thumb. Catch your breath on any landing: a heart or a name will be scratched into the wall.
Here too is the dim room where lovers test each other, as you push against the slats of a fence, word after word, caress after caress. Here too you hear cars whoosh in the distance, crazily absent, and lights cross the ceiling, as if a child flung a handful of rice. A scrap of passing music calls you, more intimate than a voice.
Here too a red glare pulses and someone shouts. Again you look down from a great height. Is the man in cuffs drunk? Why is he staggering? Again you have to decide: do I yell out the window and show where I live? Do I take a video on my cell? Where would I send it? Do I run down those endless flights, into the street, waving my hands and commanding no? Would I at least be able to memorize the license plate? Would it be blank?
Even at the end of death. Prepare yourself. Even where there is no I. No judgment, no reward.
Only the long street, the gray rain, the boarded shops, a few passersby, their eyes kept down, the lamps shining inward.
In the City of Statues
When we were old and knew we would never see Canaan we woke in the same breath dressed shivering, gulped instant,
and trudged to the rally point with our Magic Marker pasteboard to chant ourselves speechless though we did not believe the slogans and the crowd was all strangers—
(once we saw a child who looked like you forty years ago and once young lovers with our own grievance and resolve)—facing us, batons,
gas canisters, hoses, stun guns,
grenades, and the strange machine that can decipher the human face.
In the Winter of Painted Swastikas
The demonstration is winding down,
the sound system has been dismantled and stashed in numbered boxes,
students draped in frayed banners are flirting or commiserating,
there’s still a sense of safety lingering though the streets home are icy, dark, and watched,
and if two women hold hands a helmet on a rooftop will shout girls coming from the march.