A Night in Brooklyn [Hardcover]

In this gorgeous collection, D. Nurkse gives us a Brooklyn we both know and don't know, a mythic borough laden with the past but intricately layered and alive, like an unfolding time-lapse bud. The title poem operates like a compact and intimate creation story: "We undid a button,/turned out the light,/and in that narrow bed/we built the great city--/water towers, cisterns,/hot asphalt roofs, parks,/septic tanks, arterial roads..." The city begins to sprawl like uncontrollable desire, then returns to the lovers at daybreak, to be dismantled: "and we had to take it all to pieces/for there could be only one Brooklyn."

Nurkse's speakers are familiar yet inscrutable. They are never "types." The stories they tell are filled with odd and breathtaking particulars. In "Beauty," a barber squints "to clip the old man's hair/though he has so little--," and watches it fall, "holding its greasy curl/in midair as on terrazzo tile." His customer is compelled to tell "once more how his wife left him/on the steamer to Salonika/early in the Ford administration/though now it's the boat in his story/that cuts a wake like a white scar." Likewise, the tenant who regularly overhears the quarrels of the lovers in "The Next Apartment" takes the situation beyond a neighborly encounter when he meets the lovers in passing: "When they saw me/in the stairwell, they were relieved:/someone sane, a human, someone who will die./And they explained: Sorry about yesterday, sorry/about tomorrow..."

In "Twilight in Canarsie," we are taken through a dreamscape of Brooklyn past: "factories that once made shoehorns,/waffle irons, or pearl cuff links..." There's a movie marquee "with detachable vowels," a candy store selling "egg cremes and roped red licorice," and a red brick school where children "tried to carve their names clear through their desks..." But there's no nostalgia, no sense of longing for better days, only "the cemetery of lovers immobilized by marble wings," and the lingering question, "Why is it always twilight when we die, she asks/and Canarsie where we are born again?"

In a section titled "Elsewhere," Nurkse treats us to some translations of French and Spanish riddles and song fragments. In his Andalusian "coplas," which he calls "versions of anonymous originals," we can savor Nurkse's humor and sense of the absurd: "When your messenger arrived/bearing the news/that you no longer love me,/even my cat chuckled." Whether these verses were whispered in his ear by gypsy friends or dreamed up as he walked his spaniel down a sycamore-lined Brooklyn street, they speak to us in another of Nurkse's distinctive voices--their music is lovely but never simply sweet, and they laugh at themselves like those lovers apologizing in advance for tomorrow's quarrels.

One of the truly great poets of his generation. This is D. Nurkse's finest work to date, and I recommend this book most highly.