Nests in Air

Stephan Viau reviews a poetry collection that gives an excruciatingly honest account of fatherhood.

Nathan Hoks, Nests in Air (Black Ocean, 2021), 92pp.

Nathan Hok’s Nests in Air is, at its center, an eco-conscious rendering of contemporary parenthood or rather fatherhood, that is excruciatingly honest. It is like a peek into the workshop of a father-poet, whose quiet work in the garage endeavours to turn frightening truth into something dazzling for his children. Here, the nests of birds are no longer built from kindling and kettles, but rubber bands and plastic wrappers. In Nests in Air, Hoks shows the fledgling in the nest and the food that we, as parents, bring back to them. It is “sustenance” drawn from our melting and broken world; it is obscene and metonymic of our toxic selves. Nonetheless, the act of provision itself stands as perhaps the clearest sign that we want our children to live beautiful lives – as beautiful as we had hoped for our own lives – even if we know full-well the impossibility of the dream. Here, then, the crux of every parent – to dream a better life for our children.

The photographs that punctuate the section breaks in Nests in Air come across as our fathers showing us old stills and black and white photographs of the world of their childhood – when things were different – National Geographic-like slides of fossils, bee hives, icebergs, chlorophyll, and tree moss. These are the memories we write over with industrialization and, likewise, with parenthood. They are at once didactic celebrations of human curiosity and evidence of our self-destruction.

What’s interesting about Nests in Air is Hoks’ lilting tone. He does not want to intimidate or fear monger with his observations. Contrarily, reading these poems feels like being explained death as a child, with all of the delicate nuance that such an explanation necessitates. What Hoks describes, however, is not literal death; it is life as a perilous place, where one’s past creeps into every viable seam of the present and threatens to undo well-intentioned parenthood. Nests in Air is a father’s soft honesty about fatherhood – about one’s own agency screaming through while our eyes are kept on our children to keep them safe. We are haunted by previous versions of ourselves as we navigate a new us – us, the parent:

      When I put my baby in the bath
        The water stings his skin.
      Something shrill in the eye sings out.

        The dark area of a father waters
      The soft area ripping through my glassy
        Eyes. They scan the window

      And cannot make out a hill
        Against the imperial purple sky
      Since the lantern obliterates self-reflection

        And pushes the subtle winds
      Into a deeper unmined past where
        The shrill student I was sketches (6)

Fatherhood, for Hoks, is punctuated by a wandering mind, one that is grown and knows the intricacies and evils of the world and of the self: our tendency to fantasize, to reap prizes only for ourselves, to be selfish. These are what beget both our ego and, by inflation, a ruined planet. Fatherhood is a minimization of the self. It is a step back that allows tenderness to take place, if we can manage to let it. In “The Nidus,” Hoks writes:

      I want to step outside my brain,
      Absolve its monologue
      And become a small white flower
      To shade the robin egg
      That fell to the grass
      Between the shrubs and chain-link fence.

      […]

      That self festers in the cellar,
      A mold spawning new colonies
      Of devils who have swallowed the scrolls
      And digested the passwords.
      I try to vomit but what comes out
      Is neither human nor invertebrate.
      Exoskeletons cannot swim. (30)

The self is what threatens fatherhood and all life. If we can “absolve” it, we can break through to invested parenthood that is genuine and gentle, and we can do this for the planet we have mistakenly cultivated with ego, too. We can yet save this place, or learn to live around it, despite it, if we put in place of ego the deeply held propensity we have for caring.

For Hoks, none of this is easy. It takes literal magic to accomplish – as a number of the poems in Nests in Air are subtitled as “spells.”  Only if we can will ourselves through incantation into being gentler caregivers, we can lay the groundwork for a better future. To be reared by caring parents is essentially a mammoth demand of our children. It’s a passé sort of notion, almost, to think of the nuclear family being a successful vessel for life. We have too many preoccupations. Our self-investment has made parenting a nuisance – that which is in the way of getting more of what we think we want or need. Hoks doesn’t cover this or smooth it over, but he waxes anxiously, lovingly – if that makes sense. He sits his family at the table and describes to them the beast he sees in his nightmares thereby showing how poetry can initiate – and maybe cut into digestible pieces – such gruesome conversations:

      They’re not cut out for the twenty-four second news cycle.
      I’ll fold them in quarters and drop them in the soup.
      (“High Definition Nest” 72)

To be a father – or any parent – is to be worried. This worry is the instinct that makes us productive and protective caregivers. Contemporary worries have morphed from our cave-dwelling days. We are born having beat the game – we will never have to hunt or search for food – but at the expense of making the dangers that surround us less visible. What ails us is absolutely every little seed we have sown and let grow beyond conceivable repair: “O Politics / Thou art sick. The Invisible Worm will find / Your eggs in their brooding cells, suck them empty, and find / You in the picnic shelter…” (“The Wasp Nest” 74). Our children are threatened by our systems. Their lives are at risk from the predator that is late-stage capitalism, end-stage democracy.

So how do we lessen the self and make good on the promise that our children embody – which is, by reasonable presumption, to do better and be better? Hoks writes, “This afternoon I’m not thinking / about politics. / I’m removing an overgrown shrub from the front yard. / … / The breeze weaves us a new / baby blue sky” (“Nests in Air” 77). Be a child with your child, Hoks seems to say. The “emotional recovery” is in letting yourself experience other emotions besides those sparked by desire.

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Stephan Viau holds an MFA in poetry from Louisiana State University. His work has appeared in The Colorado Review, HASH, New Delta Review, among others. He lives in Maryland with his family.