Assigning Names

Assigning Names Paul Oppenheimer Burnt Island D. Nurkse Alfred A. Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 128 pages; cloth, $24.00 The Burnt Island of D. Nurkse's eighth collection is not the Burnt Norton of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Some such comparison seems inevitable, though, not least because Nurkse's island shows up as an eponymous poem at the center of a book that he divides into three "suites," thereby more than suggesting an echo of Eliot's famed four-part musical opus, and also that this linked group of poems may be meant, in Ezra Pound's useful summons, to "make it new." But is it new, and if it is, what is it renewing? A number of contrasts between these two linchpin poems, and between both of the longer works in which they appear, seem self-evident as well as intriguing . IfEliot's "Burnt Norton" takes us "Into our first world" and moves through "The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery," whose "leaves [are] full of children / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter," Nurkse's "Burnt Island"— with its title that refers to an island off the coast of Maine, whether "burnt" or not—presents us with: two villages, Baker and Chester; two industries, lobster and watercolor; two churches, Baptist and Universalist, and a single child who: followed at a fixed distance kicking a smooth white stdne that veered toward Canada, mumbling names of burweed, hiding so well we never knew, or climbing a scrub oak to find a thrush egg, an acorn lid, the tight ring of the ocean. In Eliot and Nurkse's primal visions, an early-feeling garden rises into spiritual possibilities and then slips free ofthem, withjust a hint in Nurkse's "Burnt Island" ofEliot's quietly menacing territory in which "human kind / Cannot bear very much reality." Despite these similarities and discrepancies, a measure of "Burnt Norton's" cruel and unbearable reality, but transposed and transformed, appears in Nurske's other poems. It develops as a ghostly negative even as his new poems keep returning us to the book's heart, its "Burnt Island," or lead us away from it—or to cite Eliot once more, as they "Point to one end, which is always present." Like Eliot's Four Quartets, Nurkse's book seems to be centered on that old, tantalizing puzzle: whether secure meanings can be found or said to exist. His poems are committed to uncovering those names that may move us beyond delusions, if not illusions, and into the crannies of significant memories that retain the messy residues of past events. As a result, and a bit like Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who sees any true poet's eyes "in a fine frenzy rolling" while he seeks to supply "airy nothing" with "[al local habitation and a name," this poet gambles on arriving at those rooted sorts of names that light up PAUL WEST "Writing ofwars past in a time ofwar, West creates a portrait of his father that has all the richness of Rembrandt as it evokes the endless suffering wars precipitate."—Booklist "Explores the mystery ofwar and its effects, and even more deeply the mystery ofwhat it is to be male—especially male and British in the mid-20th century."—Ithaca Times Justpublished. 187 pages, 5V2? 8V2" 0-929701-75-5 $24.00 sewn cloth Available at quality bookstores. For a listing, visit www.mcphersonco.com McPherson & Company Post Office Box 1126 Kingston, New York 12402 800-613-8219 "West stands as an authentic voice in the wilderness, a visionary who plugs the ghosts ofhistory and morality into his textual dream machine..." —Bill Marx, Boston Phoenix Published with assistance from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. the present by illuminating the past. These digging names, so to speak, have the power to clarify hearts and minds while laying bare the immanence of even trivial-seeming moments. "[A]nd somewhere / in that immense city," he writes in "My Father's Closet," the book's first poem, recreating one such crucial childhood memory, sinewy and strong, where snow trembled in high lit windows, a footstep receded, rapid, urgent, indelible as a...

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