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.
In D. Nurkse's wood of Morois, the Forest of Love, there's a fine line between the real and the imaginary, the archaic and the actual, poetry and news. The poems feature the voices of the lovers and all parties around them, including the servant Brangien; Tristan's horse, Beau Joueur; even the living spring that flows through the tale ("in my breathing shadow / the lovers hear their voices / confused with mine / promising a slate roof, / a gate, a child ..."). Nurkse brings us an Iseult who has more power than she wants over Tristan's imagination, and a Tristan who understands his fate early on: "That charm was so strong, no luck could free us." For these lovers, time closes like a book, but it remains open for us as we hear both new tones and familiar voices, eerily like our own, in this age-old story made new again.
Nurkse delivers, as always, narratives and lyrics of sparkling intelligence and wit, complicated by emotional dramas which engage, alarm, and earn our attention and concerns every step of the way.
Voices Over Water is the record of the lives of a married couple who emigrate from Estonia to Canada during the first half of this century. The woman, a preacher's daughter and musician from coastal Estonia, is the narrator for the first five poems of Part One, "Leaving Estonia." Her husband's voice interweaves with hers for the rest of the section. The man, an estate foreman, merchant and farmer, is the speaker in Part Two, "High Canada." The woman's voice returns as the major narrator in Part Three, "Easter Snow." Voices Over Water is dedicated to Viktoria and Villem Nurkse. The events in this book are fictitious.
D. Nurkse’s deeply satisfying new collection is a haunted love letter to the far corners of his hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and a meditation on the selves that were left behind in those indelible places.
Here Nurkse brings alive the particular details that shape a life, in this case unique to the world of Brooklyn—a job at the Arnold Grill, “topping off drafts with a paddle” for the truckers who came in; the deaf white alley cat that mysteriously survived the winter on a stoop in Bensonhurst; the narrow bed where young love took place; the wild gardens behind the tenements. His exploration of this almost mythic city past is combined with a sense of the future speeding toward us—the ongoing riddle of time and being in a larger universe.
D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island explores tragedy both grand and intimate, in city and country, in our own troubled moment and across the greater scope of geological time. Arranged in three “suites” of lucid, often heart-wrenching verse, the book begins with a city under siege, in a group of poems that becomes a subtle homage to New York after 9/11—a metaphorical “burnt island,” where diggers doze on their shovels, citizens contribute bottles of water, M&M’s, and casseroles to recovery efforts, and survivors, mesmerized by the photos of the missing, compare them “scar by scar with the faces of the living.” Nurkse then takes up the journey of a couple starting again in nature at a specific place called Burnt Island, where the elements instruct them, seeming to mirror their conflicts and strife. Finally, in a charming and profound series of poems centered on marine ecology, he finds the infinite in the infinitesimally small, and offers us, in sparkling, mysterious verses, the strange comfort that comes with observing the life of the ocean.
Early poetry chapbook.
"Leaving Xaia is a book one can wholeheartedly recommend for its engagement with worldly themes, its accessibility cloaked in a vivid poetic imagination and swabbed with plenty of wise and acute observation. He is part Stephen Dunn and part C.K. Williams—two of the finest, truest poets of our time rolled together—but he is characteristically and particularly Nurkse, himself, and no other." —Cortland Review
This is the first full-length collection of poems by D. Nurske, whose work has appeared in such publications as The Massachusetts Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, Epoch, Confrontation, and Hanging Loose.
Nurkse's second book of poetry.
