Nightingale

by Paisley Rekdal

Overview

Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619322011
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	06/18/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Paisley Rekdal is the author of six collections of poetry, addition to three nonfiction and hybrid-genre books. Her honors include being named Utah’s Poet Laureate.

Read an Excerpt

PHILOMELA Because her grandmother loved the arts, her father said, she’d willed the money to a distant cousin working as a sculptor. A decision made the month before she’d died from cancer, which the young woman can not now believe was due only to a brain tumor, having endured the last, deliberate ways her grandmother asked why she’d never married. The cousin, who inherited the money, showed her sculptures in a converted barn: the only space large enough to contain the seething shapes that seemed to flame up from their pedestals in precarious arcs. An audacity of engineering the young woman tried not to see as a reproach when, curious, she visited: how the sculptures made her feel too earth-bound, solid. At the gallery, she stared a long while at what she thought was a tree blasted by lightning, but the more she looked, the more clearly shapes emerged. There were a man’s hands gripping a slender figure by the waist, the thin body writhing, frozen in his arms. It was a girl, she saw, with shredded bark for breasts and dark charred wood for legs, as if the limbs had been snatched from a fire while burning. Her twig hands raked her captor’s face. The young woman could read no emotion on it, however: the plank face had been scraped clean; all the fear and anger burned instead inside their twisting bodies: she could see the two there stuck at a point of perfect hatred for each other: she for his attack, he for her resistance, perhaps the beauty he could not stand in her, as her last date in college had hissed, “You think you’re so fucking pretty,” spitting it into her face so that she’d had to turn her cheek to wipe it, which was when he’d grabbed her arm then, pinning her— Was this why her cousin had been chosen, to make what she’d had no words for? Persephone, the piece she stood amazed before had been titled: the last, unconscious gift of her grandmother. “For your wedding,” she’d said her last week, pointing to her own open palm in which nothing rested. Perhaps her grandmother had imagined a gold ring there. Perhaps a string of thick pink pearls. The young woman drove home from the gallery, took a shower, and did not tell anyone that day what it was she’d seen. A month later, in the mail, a package came from her father: her grandmother’s Singer sewing machine, its antique brass wheel scrubbed of gold, the wooden handle glossy with vines of mother-of-pearl. It was lovely, and for a moment she considered sewing a quilt with it, onto which she might embroider shooting stars in reds and saffron, the figure of a child, perhaps, or of a man by a house’s courtyard, his hat in his hands, his broad body naked, harmless. How much thread would that take to make? she wondered. And considered it a long while before packing up the machine again, sliding it back into its wood crate and high up onto a shelf of her basement closet. The place she kept her college books and papers, where she told herself it could wait. NIGHTINGALE: A GLOSS Nay, then I'll stop your mouth. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Language is the first site of loss and our first defense against it. Which is why after Philomela’s brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes her, he cuts out her tongue and tosses it, the bloody stump writhing at her feet. * In my poem “Philomela,” I leave out this mutilation. Strike out, too, Philomela’s sister, Procne, who learns of her sister’s rape from the tapestry Philomela weaves. Cut the death of Itylus, Procne’s son, whom the sisters dismember and boil for punishment; Philomela, mute but grinning, tossing the boy’s head at his father. No metamorphosis of Philomela and Procne into nightingale and swallow, Tereus shrunk into the hoopoe that pursues them. Such details would be unimaginable, I think. Not because a contemporary reader can’t imagine them, but because the details are now too grotesque for her to want to. * Ovid makes the trio’s transformation occur at the instant syntax shifts from the conditional to the imperfect. “The girls went flying…/ as if they were on wings. They were on wings!” he writes. The difference between simile and metaphor. The second the mouth conceives it, the imagination turns it into the real. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 669-670 * I’m writing “Philomela” at an artists’ colony where I go for daily runs. Sometimes a man in a car will pace me; sometimes a man on his bike will circle back to get another look. Sometimes the men who pass me say nothing. Around this residency are woods in which, the staff informs us, we can walk. It is beautiful here, and there are olive groves. I do not ever walk by myself in the woods. * It’s 1992 and I’m hiking near Loch Ness. It’s just after breakfast: I’ve spent the morning alone in a stand of gold aspen that circles the lake. When the three men find me, the smell of beer and whiskey thick on their clothes, bait boxes and fishing rods in hand, I have just sat down to rest with my book. The men are red-eyed, gruff. The first two nod as they pass me: it is the third who walks back. He has lank, gingery hair, and black spots in his teeth. Hello, he says when he reaches me. * Nightingale: OE, nihtegala, niht + galan, small, reddish-brown migratory bird celebrated for its sweet night song during the breeding season. In Dutch, a frog. Virgil, The Georgics, Book IV: [A]s mourning beneath the poplar shade the nightingale laments her lost brood… she sobs nightlong, and on a branch perched her doleful song renews—“ Shelley, The Defense of Poesy: “A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.”

Table of Contents

I

Psalm 5

Knitted Thylacine 7

The Cry 11

Four Marys 13

Psyche 18

The Wolves 21

Tiresias 23

Horn of Plenty 26

Astyanax 28

Io 30

II

Philomela 35

Nightingale: A Gloss 38

III

Quiver 57

Gokstadt/Ganymede 59

Telling the Wasps 74

IV

Marsyas 77

Pasiphae 79

The Olive Tree at Vouves 82

Driving to Santa Fe 85

Pear 87

Pythagorean 90

About the Author 97

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/18/2019

In her fifth book, Rekdal (Imaginary Vessels) reenvisions Ovid’s Metamorphoses to offer a haunting meditation on the vulnerability of the body and an exploration of how one goes on living after literal or metaphorical loss. In one poem, a woman experiences her child’s gender transition while undergoing treatment for cancer, losing a daughter but gaining a more fully realized, authentic son. In “Pasiphaë,” a woman clings to her dog after the death of the man they both loved, their grief symbolized by their shared flea infestation. At the book’s core are two related poems, “Philomela” and “Nightingale: A Gloss.” In the former, Rekdal pens a tale of receiving a sewing machine from her grandmother, while the latter deconstructs all that was left unsaid in that story. Philomela’s rape by Tireseus is used to disclose the speaker’s own experience with sexual assault, juxtaposing this narrative against passages of literary theory and poetry by Shelley, Keats, and Czeslaw Milosz. This, too, leads to metamorphosis: “Perhaps it is sentimental to suggest violence has given me meaning, that the heart of poetry was ever and only silence. Madness to say, yes, there’s pain, but would I have changed without it?” Here, Rekdal translates pain into redemption, so that a loss is not an ending but a transformation, in this riveting poetic alchemy. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Rekdal is a poet of observation and history, one who carefully weighs the consequences of time. She revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries in which ‘we hold still for the camera, believing/ it will shore up time, knowing it won't.’ These are some of the best lyric poems being written today.” Craig Morgan Teicher, The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 2016 “Geoffrey Hill once praised what he referred to as ‘the sensuous intellect,’ and that seems to be what moves Rekdal (in both senses of the verb) most often in [her] poems… [that] end in generous, small deceptions, uncertain transformations, and beauty. It’s the kind of thing we might get from a short story but that our notions of poetry too often seem to preclude (Rekdal’s poems, while unmistakably poetry, often excel at prose virtues)—a commitment to illusion based on its potential to hold something valuable and true.” Jonathan Farmer, The Kenyon Review “Rekdal’s [work] is relentlessly heartbreaking and intense, but also full of the pleasures of closely observed detail and imagination given free rein.” Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “As with her previous books, Imaginary Vessels is sheer pleasure to read. Words tumble over each other in an exuberance of language that seems effortless, in spite of the fact, or perhaps because of it, that quite a few of her poems have formal structure and rhyme revealing meticulous craft.” Amy Brunvand, 15 Bytes “[Rekdal’s] poems deepen questions of the containers and of containing, the world fitting into the world, the closed body finding itself lonely, the skull empty and knowing what it must have held. Rekdal is also just plain fun.” Jennifer Michael Hecht, American Poet

From the Publisher

★ 05/01/2019

Poems by two-time Kingsley Tufts Prize finalist Rekdal (Imaginary Vessels) are rich with sensory language and a gift for story, real or invented. Here, the poet retells many of Ovid's myths, modernizing them and including a sonnet sequence and long narrative piece that moves between poetry and prose. In addition, she invokes the nightingale, long a symbol for poets, as the centerpiece of these poems. But her nightingale doesn't deliver a sweet night song. In Ovid's "Philomela" metamorphosis, the bird becomes the symbol of violence. Philomela, who was raped and mutilated, doesn't cry out—nor does the character in Rekdal's reimagining, who is also being violated. Have they become inarticulate? Tongue-tied? Terrified by fear? In Ovid's story, Philomela's tongue is cut out, and she becomes a nightingale. Since female nightingales are mute, it begs the question: Do we need to speak to be heard? Rekdal carries the question forward with urgency: "Sing,/ for you are voiceless. Sing, for it cannot matter. Sing, for soon no one/ will hear you again." VERDICT Lovely, lyrical, bracing work: a must-read.—Karla Huston, Appleton, WI

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