Home

Paul Scott Stanfield reviews Sara Nicholson’s third collection of poems.

Sara Nicholson, April (Song Cave, 2023), 73pp.

Like many books, Sara Nicholson’s April has an author photograph inside its back cover, but contrary to convention, the author has her back to the camera. She walks away from us on a woodland path, a dog trotting beside her. The photograph is one of several ways in which the book acknowledges the conventions of poetry while not quite acquiescing to them—the rhymeless sonnets of “A Crown for Iris,” for instance, or the ekphrastic poem on Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert that may really be about the museum, the Frick, where the painting is housed. Nicholson’s dry skepticism about the Frick as a temple of art (“New York / Money laundered / By the spirit of the Old / Master paintings”) extends to the institutions around poetry. In the essay titled “Lives of the Saints” that this collection of poems includes (bending expectations again), Nicholson conjures up an emblem:

In the garden of literature, there is a broken obelisk. It’s hidden away, surrounded by thorns. To find it, you must first walk past fountains and statues, woods and arbors, grottoes and budding wildflower meadows. It’s difficult to read the inscription on the obelisk because of all the cracks and chips. It is dedicated to the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, the National Book Critics Circle, and the MacArthur Foundation.

All those institutions do worthwhile work, of course, but any institution will tend to ossification and misplaced priorities, becoming more interested in its own well-being than the well-being of the thing it was created to foster—it will turn into the chipped obelisk surrounded by thorns in a flourishing meadow. Nicholson’s wariness of how poetry gets an upper-case initial and becomes “Poetry” may, for some, have a biting-the-hand aspect (her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day), but then again it was shared by Emily Dickinson (“Publication – is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man –”) and Marianne Moore, whose poem “Poetry” famously begins, “I, too, dislike it.”

Sainthood gets almost as much attention in April as poetry does, and appropriately so, since saints are as essential to the institutions of religion as poets are to the institutions of poetry, but, like poets, can be cantankerous, inconvenient, and inassimilable prior to their death and canonization. “How we love to read about eccentric people. How we hate to meet them in real life,” Nicholson writes. Even St. Teresa of Avila, who provides the collection’s epigraph (“But I, a poor wretch, have need of everything”), wrote her autobiography because the local hierarchy insisted that she explain what she thought she was doing. What relationship does St. Francis, emerged from his cell into golden seraphic light in Bellini’s painting, have with “the world / He’s escaped from,” the “citadel / In the top-left / Corner and the people / Who must surely live there,” to say nothing of the “goatherd and his flock” in the middle distance”? What relationship can he have? Whatever the saint has to do, it is probably best done apart from any institution. Nicholson relates an anecdote of older hermit telling a younger one, “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything,” and comments, “I think this makes for fantastic writing advice. No one can help you. Everything you need, you have.” And yet poets do sometimes need jobs, and where but in institutions will they find them? Some such awkward necessity is reflected in Nicholson’s bleakly funny “To the Committee”:

I have an exemplary record of service
At the University level.
A wreath
Of plastic berries.
A White Claw and a Natty
Daddy in the snow.
Thank you
For your consideration.
I look forward to hearing from you.

But keep in mind, too, Nicholson reminds us later, that “Saints and poets have always weaponized their humility.”

“Religion and art,” Nicholson writes in “Lives of the Saints,” “Two moons orbiting the same planet.” Nicholson wisely leaves the planet unnamed, but we might call it spirit or being. It defies capture. Institutions will be little help (“The spirit of an institution: a contradiction in terms,” Nicholson writes). We can, however, wonder how we can best approach understanding it, as Nicholson does in “A Crown for Iris,” a series of linked sonnets exploring an observation by one of Iris Murdoch’s characters: “‘There is no beyond, there is only here, / The infinitely small, infinitely / Great, and utterly demanding present.’” April sometimes moves in very close, sometimes withdraws very far, but it is always orbiting that planet. The book’s title poem opens with some simple quotidian affirmations: “It can be nice, some days / To sit down and think. / Fresh air is good.”  Things proceed unremarkably until we hit an abrupt re-focusing:

A little pepper on the biscuit, not
Too much onion, just a slice.
The sea is calm tonight.
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain.
I’m tired. The wind is blowing
Only just.

Something opens vertiginously when the seasoning of a biscuit gives way to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and W. B. Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” two of the language’s most famous poems of exhaustion. What kind of April is this—sweet Chaucerian showers piercing the drought of March, or Eliotic lilacs bred out of the dead land? In the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere, one had better be prepared for anything: “The snow is good / And the rain.” The poem is a good example of a recurring experience in April: a simple surface under which we suddenly sense depths under depths. As Nicholson puts it, “Poems, ideally, should be like saints’ lives. That is, they should be experiments in magical thinking and include at least two miracles.”

In April, Nicholson is willing to turn her back on poetry, or Poetry (“I do not envy them Poetry. Oh Lord / They can have it”), but the great thing is that she never turns her back on the reader. The reader at times is a specific person (“Jane, it’s Sara, can you / Hear me?”), but generally it is whoever is willing to take the risk of reading the poem, in the spirit of one of Emily Dickinson’s other salutes to anonymity: “I’m Nobody! Who are you? / Are you – Nobody – too?” If we are the kind of reader who reads back-of-the-book acknowledgements, we learn in Nicholson’s that the subject of the drawing on the book’s cover is Nicholson herself, with her cats. Far from turning her back on us, she has been looking us in the eye the whole time.

Paul Scott Stanfield was educated at Grinnell College and Northwestern University, and is recently retired from the English Department of Nebraska Wesleyan University. He is the author of Yeats and Politics in the 1930s and of articles on Yeats, other Irish poets, and Wyndham Lewis.

Find us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hkreviewofbooks/