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A review by madlymerc
Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal
5.0
TW: Sexaul Assualt
So, I confess - I've never read Ovid's Metamorphoses. However, I don't feel like that fact greatly hampered my enjoyment of this collection. Being unfamiliar with some of the myths and relationships at play in over-arching metaphors meant I had to look them up, which gave me time to linger over these poems more than I probably would have done if I knew what was what.
This collection is a stunner. Individual retellings of Ovid's myths are tied together with an unwinding reflection on the concept/metaphor/linguistic/literary implications of the nightingale that peaks in the poem "Nightingale: A Gloss". This stand-out prose poem takes up a staggering 17 pages at the center of the book and puts every page to good use. Rekdal uses this poem to reflect on other writings in the collection, her own writing process, the aftermath of sexual assault, and the poet's perpetual desire to parse the flesh of language and find its stone heart. My experience with Rekdal's writing in this collection exists in a chasm of resisting opposites - never has a writer made me feel such a potent cocktail of intimacy and alienation. Rekdal is here to tell you that language, a tool universally employed to bring order to concepts and express those concepts to others, falls short when addressing some of the most pivotal acts of violence and transcendence we experience as human beings. Our language is a failure in recounting the act, leaving us instead with negatives of our own experiences.
Nevertheless, Rekdal does provide the reader with some sense of justice in pieces like "Philomela", which sprouts discomfort between its lines like a garden and then blooms to a soothing/seething finish with the gift of a sewing machine and time. In "Gokstadt/Ganymede", Rekdal admits uncomfortable truths about trauma with a nakedness that is embarrassing and unequivocal: "When you sensed, what I hated:/some part of me loved you, not in spite of,/but because you had been raped.", that brings the reader into the darkness of loving while hurting and loving while healing.
Perhaps the most easily overlooked thing about this collection is the steady, elegant language that wraps itself around each piece, sometimes comforting, sometimes suffocating. This gift for the subtle image is apparent in many of Rekdal's pieces, but I enjoyed it most in "Telling the Wasps":
And so I fell among the wasps, whispering
your name into the hole I scooped
beside the marshy winter creek, where wind
now scours the freezing water. Where reed
on broken reed hums its numb refrain,
and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps.
So, I confess - I've never read Ovid's Metamorphoses. However, I don't feel like that fact greatly hampered my enjoyment of this collection. Being unfamiliar with some of the myths and relationships at play in over-arching metaphors meant I had to look them up, which gave me time to linger over these poems more than I probably would have done if I knew what was what.
This collection is a stunner. Individual retellings of Ovid's myths are tied together with an unwinding reflection on the concept/metaphor/linguistic/literary implications of the nightingale that peaks in the poem "Nightingale: A Gloss". This stand-out prose poem takes up a staggering 17 pages at the center of the book and puts every page to good use. Rekdal uses this poem to reflect on other writings in the collection, her own writing process, the aftermath of sexual assault, and the poet's perpetual desire to parse the flesh of language and find its stone heart. My experience with Rekdal's writing in this collection exists in a chasm of resisting opposites - never has a writer made me feel such a potent cocktail of intimacy and alienation. Rekdal is here to tell you that language, a tool universally employed to bring order to concepts and express those concepts to others, falls short when addressing some of the most pivotal acts of violence and transcendence we experience as human beings. Our language is a failure in recounting the act, leaving us instead with negatives of our own experiences.
Nevertheless, Rekdal does provide the reader with some sense of justice in pieces like "Philomela", which sprouts discomfort between its lines like a garden and then blooms to a soothing/seething finish with the gift of a sewing machine and time. In "Gokstadt/Ganymede", Rekdal admits uncomfortable truths about trauma with a nakedness that is embarrassing and unequivocal: "When you sensed, what I hated:/some part of me loved you, not in spite of,/but because you had been raped.", that brings the reader into the darkness of loving while hurting and loving while healing.
Perhaps the most easily overlooked thing about this collection is the steady, elegant language that wraps itself around each piece, sometimes comforting, sometimes suffocating. This gift for the subtle image is apparent in many of Rekdal's pieces, but I enjoyed it most in "Telling the Wasps":
And so I fell among the wasps, whispering
your name into the hole I scooped
beside the marshy winter creek, where wind
now scours the freezing water. Where reed
on broken reed hums its numb refrain,
and love turns in its mud home, and sleeps.