Nightingale - Softcover

Rekdal, Paisley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556595670 ISBN 13: 9781556595677

Verlag: Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

“Here, Rekdal translates pain into redemption, so that a loss is not an ending but a transformation, in this riveting poetic alchemy.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review “Nightingale explores what few writers since Ovid have reminded us: metamorphosis is a violent act, requiring dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation before we can become something new.” ―New York Journal of Books Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paisley Rekdal is the author of six collections of poetry, addition to three nonfiction and hybrid-genre books. Her honors include being named Utah’s Poet Laureate.

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PHILOMELA Because her grandmother loved the arts, her father said, she’d willed the money to a distant cousin working as a sculptor. A decision made the month before she’d died from cancer, which the young woman can not now believe was due only to a brain tumor, having endured the last, deliberate ways her grandmother asked why she’d never married. The cousin, who inherited the money, showed her sculptures in a converted barn: the only space large enough to contain the seething shapes that seemed to flame up from their pedestals in precarious arcs. An audacity of engineering the young woman tried not to see as a reproach when, curious, she visited: how the sculptures made her feel too earth-bound, solid. At the gallery, she stared a long while at what she thought was a tree blasted by lightning, but the more she looked, the more clearly shapes emerged. There were a man’s hands gripping a slender figure by the waist, the thin body writhing, frozen in his arms. It was a girl, she saw, with shredded bark for breasts and dark charred wood for legs, as if the limbs had been snatched from a fire while burning. Her twig hands raked her captor’s face. The young woman could read no emotion on it, however: the plank face had been scraped clean; all the fear and anger burned instead inside their twisting bodies: she could see the two there stuck at a point of perfect hatred for each other: she for his attack, he for her resistance, perhaps the beauty he could not stand in her, as her last date in college had hissed, “You think you’re so fucking pretty,” spitting it into her face so that she’d had to turn her cheek to wipe it, which was when he’d grabbed her arm then, pinning her― Was this why her cousin had been chosen, to make what she’d had no words for? Persephone, the piece she stood amazed before had been titled: the last, unconscious gift of her grandmother. “For your wedding,” she’d said her last week, pointing to her own open palm in which nothing rested. Perhaps her grandmother had imagined a gold ring there. Perhaps a string of thick pink pearls. The young woman drove home from the gallery, took a shower, and did not tell anyone that day what it was she’d seen. A month later, in the mail, a package came from her father: her grandmother’s Singer sewing machine, its antique brass wheel scrubbed of gold, the wooden handle glossy with vines of mother-of-pearl. It was lovely, and for a moment she considered sewing a quilt with it, onto which she might embroider shooting stars in reds and saffron, the figure of a child, perhaps, or of a man by a house’s courtyard, his hat in his hands, his broad body naked, harmless. How much thread would that take to make? she wondered. And considered it a long while before packing up the machine again, sliding it back into its wood crate and high up onto a shelf of her basement closet. The place she kept her college books and papers, where she told herself it could wait. NIGHTINGALE: A GLOSS Nay, then I'll stop your mouth. Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus Language is the first site of loss and our first defense against it. Which is why after Philomela’s brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes her, he cuts out her tongue and tosses it, the bloody stump writhing at her feet. * In my poem “Philomela,” I leave out this mutilation. Strike out, too, Philomela’s sister, Procne, who learns of her sister’s rape from the tapestry Philomela weaves. Cut the death of Itylus, Procne’s son, whom the sisters dismember and boil for punishment; Philomela, mute but grinning, tossing the boy’s head at his father. No metamorphosis of Philomela and Procne into nightingale and swallow, Tereus shrunk into the hoopoe that pursues them. Such details would be unimaginable, I think. Not because a contemporary reader can’t imagine them, but because the details are now too grotesque for her to want to. * Ovid makes the trio’s transformation occur at the instant syntax shifts from the conditional to the imperfect. “The girls went flying…/ as if they were on wings. They were on wings!” he writes. The difference between simile and metaphor. The second the mouth conceives it, the imagination turns it into the real. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 669-670 * I’m writing “Philomela” at an artists’ colony where I go for daily runs. Sometimes a man in a car will pace me; sometimes a man on his bike will circle back to get another look. Sometimes the men who pass me say nothing. Around this residency are woods in which, the staff informs us, we can walk. It is beautiful here, and there are olive groves. I do not ever walk by myself in the woods. * It’s 1992 and I’m hiking near Loch Ness. It’s just after breakfast: I’ve spent the morning alone in a stand of gold aspen that circles the lake. When the three men find me, the smell of beer and whiskey thick on their clothes, bait boxes and fishing rods in hand, I have just sat down to rest with my book. The men are red-eyed, gruff. The first two nod as they pass me: it is the third who walks back. He has lank, gingery hair, and black spots in his teeth. Hello, he says when he reaches me. * Nightingale: OE, nihtegala, niht + galan, small, reddish-brown migratory bird celebrated for its sweet night song during the breeding season. In Dutch, a frog. Virgil, The Georgics, Book IV: [A]s mourning beneath the poplar shade the nightingale laments her lost brood… she sobs nightlong, and on a branch perched her doleful song renews―“ Shelley, The Defense of Poesy: “A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.”

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Copper Canyon Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1556595670
• ISBN 13: 9781556595677
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 96
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar