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The Rules of Paradise
by D. Nurkse
88 pages, Four Way Books, 2001
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D. Nurkse's latest collection of poetry, The Rules of Paradise
(Four Way Books, 2001), follows the lifecycle of a
nomad, someone in exile who is struggling to identify
himself through his father, his politics, his spouse,
and finally his daughter. The three-section, 75-page
collection is simultaneously a familial exploration
and an isolated one. The first section is devoted to
poems reflecting on the narrator's father and a
childhood of traveling through "The Great
Cities." There is an evident and active
curiosity in the language and imagery of the first
section:
Each city is larger than the
last,
Each room smaller,
Each keyhole more dazzling.
I tiptoe to the curtain
And see a general on a stone horse,
And moonlit slums—roofs crisscrossed
By immense names, massed laundry,
Towers where every window is lit."
('Childhood and the Great Cities,' p.7)
But there is also a rigidly maintained distance
between father and son:
Incase I can read his mind,
he dreams in his own language.
('Childhood and the Great Cities,' p.7)
The book pivots on familial wisdom gleaned from
the narrator's institutionalized grandmother in the
middle of the first section, where the "rules of
paradise" are extolled:
the rules of paradise
are that you must have nothing."
('The Garden at St. Mary's,' p. 17)
This sense of nothing is visible in the lack of
personal attachment involved in these poems: the
distance between and then loss of a father, a
divorce, the inexplicable estrangement from a
daughter, and the undeniable distancing from even
oneself.
Although the second section slows in pace and
contains more poems, it maintains its accessibility
and its faithfulness to the great search—and
ultimate disbelief in—connection. The narrator
is sifting through his own adulthood, with the search
growing more desperate and the childhood curiosity
fading. There is less patience for discovery here,
but perhaps more surprise, and certainly some imagery
of the infancy/vulnerability of the first section
appears again.
Now we're huddled here,
A company of naked men.
('Draft Hall,' p. 27)
The poems are close, emotionally tangible,
searching for vicarious identity. Yet, the voice
leans much more toward the visceral than the
cerebral. The book captures a frustration with ideas
of conventional happiness and connection, and the
disappointment they have wrought:
And we hear the heartbeat--
Command after command
In an unknown language,
Directing us to be happy,
To be mother and father,
To grow old, to be loved,
To wait all our lives
For a single moment.
('Birth Room,' p. 44)
In section three, the isolation becomes the
narrator's separation from himself:
A man with my face
Came out buttoning his shirt
Sleepily.
[…]
My wife appeared beside him
With our child in her arms.
('The Latch,' p.55)
Nurkse utilizes a form brimming with colons, which
act as much more than a simple grammatical tool. The
colons in these poems seem to be doors, opening up a
deeper side of their antecedents.
I peeked through my eyelashes:
The scallops in the wallpaper,
Not just watched but watching back
With a harrowing attention.
('Childhood and the Last War,'
p.10)
This pattern of colon use is pervasive throughout
the three sections, and in the poem 'Invisible
Fraction,' the tool is epitomized as the poem itself
is one sentence opened and reopened by the use of the
colon.
The poems of this book are often constructed
without stanza breaks, creating a narrative flow that
is further supported by the sparse use of caesura and
the matter-of-fact end-stopped lines (often utilizing
a strong period, rather than a lighter end-stop by
comma). This method serves to reassure the reader
that, as well as being poetic, these are stories unto
themselves, stories with a definite sense of unbroken
voice. The blunt lines bring a sense of cut-and-dry
perspective to the book that is carried to the end:
He has left his life
With his baggage in the village.
('My Father at Prades,' p.22)
Although the second and third sections are dotted
with caesura, the pause tends to emanate from the
loss of the father. There is more doubt after the
first section, more cause for hesitation. However,
the blunt lines remain:
I was not beaten
But the boy beside me was.
('Scattering the March,' p.30)
The final section questions, not speculatively,
but as aggressive interrogation:
Are your parents or the
pictures dead?
('The Last Border,' p.60)
Since Leaving Xaia, Nurkse has
grown in subtleties. William Stafford once remarked
that every poem is political, and Nurkse does not
make any attempt to obfuscate his politics. While Leaving Xaia vacillated
between politics and the personal relationships of
the narrator, it leaned more toward the blatantly
political. The Rules of Paradise
brings the focus to the personal relationships but
maintains a strong sense of politics. The writing has
grown in succinctness and understatement, although
the message is perhaps deflated of hope and
anticipation. The form and arrangement of the two
books are very similar, but the voice and purpose
shift ever so slightly.
As a whole, The Rules of Paradise
works in isolation, skeptical of owning anything but
its own memory and emotion. The voice shows no
resistance; it works its way around in a circle back
to the same distance evoked between father and son in
the first section, but by the end, there is a
heightened sense of bitterness.
I wanted to tell you
how cruel you are,
how you locked me out of my life.
('The Hotel Metropole,' p.67)
The imagery of these poems is experienced, and the
language is that of a veteran at disappointment.
Nurkse makes loneliness beautiful, and beauty, rare.
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