Description

Knopf, hardcover

Publication Date:April 19, 2022

Publisher Marketing: The selected poems of an essential American poet, who has cast a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our hearts hidden stories over eleven books and thirty-five years.

D. Nurkses immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that childs dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.

Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boys baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (We showed her daylight in our cupped hands), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (but on the streets / there was no one), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens.

Throughout this matchless career, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply existsbirdsong, moonrise, illness, water towersand the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.