Knopf, Nurkse also works for human rights organizations, writing on human rights issues, and was elected to the board of directors of Amnesty International USA. A poem coherently expresses the presence of a human creature. You want lamps to go on. On Poetry. Dennis Nurkse turns on lamps. When in his poems, we find ourselves awash in the light of the voice, its intimate encounters with others, with the self, with what's possible, what's unexpected, in this human world made of relationship.
His recent books firmly establish his as a major voice in American poetry. After I read D. Well I was wrong, there was a poet who could and recently did publish a better book, the same D.
A Night in Brooklyn, his newest collection, finds him on home territoryβhe was for a time the Poet Laureate of Brooklynβhe should be the laureate of the Western Hemisphere. He possesses the ability to employ the language of our American streets, shops, bars, factories, and any place else and construct truly lyrical poems, sometimes of love, sometimes of anger. In Dennis Nurkse's astonishing new book, A Night in Brooklyn , one scene reappears with the intimacy and eeriness of a recurring dream.
Two lovers lie together and separate in a room that's theirs or not theirsβin a city that's familiar or foreign. There's a window or a mirror in which time is passing: dusk, dark, dawn. Beyond the room, the relentless business of The City: labor, commerce, celebration, distraction, devotion, betrayal, conflict. Are the lovers safe or unsafe? Is their love safe or unsafe? How will they locate themselves in the world? Beginning with Shadow Wars in , Dennis Nurkse has given us ten books of poetry that might be read as a long meditation on such central human questions.
Intimacy and estrangement, home and exile, memory and loss, insight and bafflement, a fragile peace and open warfare: these are the opposing forces that animate his beautiful, unsettling poems.
