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A review by mepresley
Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
I enjoyed reading this so much. It was dark and violent and sad. It was loss and pain and grief and desire and longing. And it was fucking clever as hell, the way that she used the literary allusions / mythology, especially the Ovid. My favorite poems were "Nightingale: A Gloss" (which also plays with the Romantics, of course) and "Pear" but I also really, really loved "Four Marys," "Philomela," "Gokstadt/ Ganymede," "Marsyas," "Driving to Santa Fe" and "Pythagorean."
From Nightingale:
Is the metonym, finally, for Philomela art, or silence, or raving? Later
poets' use of the nightingale suggests she is able to sing about and
against suffering, but Ovid never mentions song. Instead, he symbolizes
Philomela and Procne by the murder of Itys: "And even so the red marks
of the murder/ stayed on their breasts: the feathers were blood-colored."
What is our longing to hear Philomela's song but our own desire for
retributive justice?....
What if it is the form, not the content, of The Metamorphoses that is
the terror? Each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting,
thus delaying the ending? What if, because we came to listen, we are the
reason the story keeps not ending? Why should Philomela sing, when our
presence only increases her suffering?
.....
In life, time's passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem's
chronology forces us to see repetition: lyrics time is not progressive but
fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time....
Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds
always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit....
The nightingale hovers between trauma and memory, its song meant to
bring one into concert with the other, to integrate event into narrative, to
bring pain out of the body and into language. But the song isn't heard, it's
longed for....
I have spent my life devoted to an art whose foundational symbol is one
of unspeakable violence. Did I seek poetry out for this? Or was I, that
day in the woods, made into a poet? Perhaps, whether we are changed
into our opposites or shrunk into the form that best defines us, some part
of transformation is always a curse.
From Nightingale:
Is the metonym, finally, for Philomela art, or silence, or raving? Later
poets' use of the nightingale suggests she is able to sing about and
against suffering, but Ovid never mentions song. Instead, he symbolizes
Philomela and Procne by the murder of Itys: "And even so the red marks
of the murder/ stayed on their breasts: the feathers were blood-colored."
What is our longing to hear Philomela's song but our own desire for
retributive justice?....
What if it is the form, not the content, of The Metamorphoses that is
the terror? Each story unfolding into another, perpetually disrupting,
thus delaying the ending? What if, because we came to listen, we are the
reason the story keeps not ending? Why should Philomela sing, when our
presence only increases her suffering?
.....
In life, time's passage allows us to see ourselves change, but a poem's
chronology forces us to see repetition: lyrics time is not progressive but
fragmentary and recursive. Traumatic time works like lyric time....
Mourning is merely the process by which we remain frozen: the birds
always in flight, the hoopoe continually in pursuit....
The nightingale hovers between trauma and memory, its song meant to
bring one into concert with the other, to integrate event into narrative, to
bring pain out of the body and into language. But the song isn't heard, it's
longed for....
I have spent my life devoted to an art whose foundational symbol is one
of unspeakable violence. Did I seek poetry out for this? Or was I, that
day in the woods, made into a poet? Perhaps, whether we are changed
into our opposites or shrunk into the form that best defines us, some part
of transformation is always a curse.