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Tim Nolan has said that when he composes poems, he has no idea what he’s going to write about; he just lets his hand do all the work. Tim Nolan’s hand, then, must have an eclectic mindset coursing through its thumb and fingers, as well as a playful sense of spontaneity, on display in his fourth collection, simply titled Lines (Nodin Press). For example, it thinks about the guy who laid bricks in “The brick wall so beautiful he picked / each brick for where it would go” (“Brick Wall”). And it ruminates on the comic story of how someone sat down on a 16th Century Ming Dynasty chair at the MIA and broke it:
...he was just looking for
Some place to rest his weary bones there
Was a sign Don’t Sit Here or something
Like that but there are so many signs and
Placards at museums you can’t keep up
I love how Nolan sympathizes with rather than ridicules this hapless individual. The trick Nolan has of eliding sentences without punctuation is certainly not unique to him, but the technique works well with his off-the-cuff style and whimsical cognitive meanderings. Lines is perhaps not as artfully crafted as The Sound of It or And Then, and even a bit more laid back than the mellow The Field—but its unvarnished feel is also more open an inviting. Cats fetching toys, someone on Facebook asking what the meaning of life is, reminiscing about gas station maps and how you could never fold them up again—out of this myriad of idle contemplation Tim Nolan’s hand is somehow able to conjure a wonderful portrait of Tim Nolan himself—this guy in his late middle ages, observant, caring, passionate and a bit curmudgeonly as well, as when he informs us in “Mind Your Own Business” that:
A big chunk of American people right now
Are totally crazy it has never been so obvious
Since the Civil War the ones out in the woods
But the main thread tying the poems in this collection together is memory. “Remember” is a nostalgia poem about going to the movies—as viewed from the isolation of our recent pandemic—while “1950s TV Set” reaches back into Nolan’s childhood, when their television had:
a rounded
Convex shape like the glassy eye
Of a fish in profile when the screen was
Asleep it had this green gray dulness
And after you turned it on:
I took awhile to figure out exactly what
You were seeing but with slow time
It became clear as clear as it could be
That you were looking at a man wearing
A shiny jumpsuit spinning plates on long
Wobbly sticks so many plates about ten
The man spinning the plates on sticks could be Nolan himself, with all the curious whirling poems in Lines balancing themselves out on the printed page.
Nodin also published a couple of “new and selected” collections this year. Norita Dittberner-Jax weaves beautiful poems from the cloth of daily life, and so World Enough and Time feels rather like an autobiography in verse.
As a young girl it was like this—
slipping out of the cabin
in early morning
down to the dock, easing
the rowboat out
(“It Was Like This”)
Notice the clarity, the simplicity, she had even then, back in 1995. No line is overstuffed with words, and the stanza is allowed to stand gracefully without artful ploys or explication. Her later poems are perhaps darker in tone, but never lose that feathery lightness. Like this stanza from one of her most recent poems, “Cows”:
Curious, they came forward.
The dog barked and ran at them,
a show of bravado. They stopped.
I picked Muffin up and held her.
Like the cows, the poems in World Enough and Time never stray too far from home—yet the mystical world is always, somehow, hovering near. Like the work of May Sarton or Jane Kenyon, Dittberner-Jax’s poetry is built around the scaffolding of her life. It carries her “suitcase of loss”—her neighborhood, the paintings she loves, postcards, poems about dogs, an endearing love for husband and children. Yet it remains untethered and universal, and the reader can always find an open door. These are poems to remember and live by.
Speaking of doors—Sharon Chmielarz scatters many of them about the landscape of her inquisitive, adventurous verse. Her poems often take the journey outlined in these stanzas:
Perspective
leads past a street
corner to the narrow
hallway all old lanes
turn into.
At the end, light
makes a red border
around a closed door.
The air
is so dense
breathing turns
into midnight.
The lines above are from “City of Arhirit”, one of the new poems found in her beautiful and almost hefty “selected and new” collection, Duet in the Little Blue Church. A South Dakota-born teacher, Chmielarz says she was encouraged by one of her poetry instructors, the poet Michael Dennis Browne, to write about herself, rather than, say, a poem about bells that echoes Edgar Allen Poe:
Never whining after holing
themselves up in a tower for hours
tolling
to the full
ends of their leashes
So she took Browne’s advice and began to write about her family—particularly the love-hate relationship with her father. Some of these poems are downright chilling—such as “Near the Iris”, a poem from Chmielarz’s first book, Different Arrangements (1982):
Imagine you’re the five-year-old,
standing beside a bed of iris,
dressed in your mom’s old raincoat.
From inside the house
comes the sound of a piano
gone wild; you father
pounding away on your mother
The collection’s title poem, written midway through Chmielarz’s career and appearing in The Rhubarb King (2006) holds a somewhat different portrait of him:
Listening to him
you’d think we two sang
the way the saved sing,
making the connection
between loss and love
Of course there is something to be said for poetry about bells, robins, tomatoes, tables; poems with “frogs thick in the muck, no leg-room between” (“Little Eternities”). Chmielarz seems to have never lost her first inclinations, traveling far afield in verse to the 18th century (The Other Mozart), biblical times (The J Horoscope) and that medieval specialty, the riddle (Speaking in Riddles). But in her best poetry (and her best is something to behold) she is able to tether, kite-like, that sense of the “other”, so distinct in her voice, with something intimate and near to home. Like the Berlin Baptist, the little blue church of her childhood that graces the cover of this volume and which she first describes in her 1991 poem “Like a Church”:
In the pause between hymns
you can hear the wind,
the sound of the farm,
the people I come from.
And its taste on the tongue is grit.
Southwest of the little blue church, in the deserts of New Mexico, you’ll meet the poet DB Jonas. The title poem of his splendid debut collection, Tarantula Season (Finishing Line Press) highlights a curious natural phenomenon: traveling trantulas. The large spiders don’t actually migrate; rather the trek is performed each fall by males looking for a mate:
In serried ranks,
these asterisms of the dust
raise gingerly their felted knees in air,
stepping daintily into a beckoning East,
to accomplish the dutiful Hajj
If you are reaching for a dictionary or doing a Google search to find out what “asterism” is, I’ll save you the time—it is, according to Oxford, “a prominent pattern or group of stars, typically having a popular name but smaller than a constellation.” Best keep that dictionary handy though, as Mr. Jonas is a collector of rare words. Like “ipseity”, a lovely word that means “individual identity” or “selfhood”. You’d think a poem titled “Ipseity and Sorrow” would be about humans, right? Instead we are on a rocky outcrop with sea birds, and it’s a poem about youth:
In other words
it is always only as the frigate-birds
abandoned to the threadbare sky
above the puffins, terns and tossings,
and all the salt-rimed clutches rattling
on their shallow niches
that we first meet
life’s icy onslaughts in our slender down,
pop-eyed, trembling, requiring of the gunmetal air
some warm wiggling thing, some placation
of this emphatic void, an answer
to the rummaging vacancy down deep
The ipseity of Tarantula Season is undeniable. It’s not that Jonas writes about himself—the poems are rarely autobiographical in character—but they are imprinted with his idiosyncratic turns of mind. Perhaps too idiosyncratic—as if an Ivy League academic had a secret identity as a farm hand in the desert southwest, with its coachwhips, mountain hollows and "winy odors of decay."
Of course we also step into Giacometti's studio, find Orpheus in the underworld, read a letter from Nietzsche and a Hölderlin translation, visit medieval Spain and 17th century Salem, and overhear a lonely teenager whistling in the stairwell. In short we enter "the noisy empire of boundless flight." In the tradition of Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens, DB Jonas has constructed a soaring architecture in verse.
- Joel Van Valin 