Patricia Nelson: Out of the Underworld

Patricia Nelson’s opening poem in Out of the Underworld contains the epigraph “—after Nazim Hikmet.” I confess that on first reading I did not know Hikmet or why “Another Massacre and Driving Home” might owe a debt to him. But then I found his poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” with lines such as “I never knew I liked / night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain / I don’t like / comparing nightfall to a tired bird // I didn’t know I loved the earth” establishing the basis for the anaphora spread throughout the remainder of the poem. Reading Nelson’s poem again, I realized that like a good wine needing to breathe in order reveal its depth of structure and shades of flavor, I was in for something special reading the remainder of this collection.

Another Massacre and Driving Home

            —after Nazim Hikmet

There is lifting and lulling, circle after circle,

dark birds, a flying eddy

of loud, inch-wide mouths.

The sky undulates and slips past,

its darkening alive, a gliding-by of eels.

I never knew I loved the repetition,

the road, curve upon curve,

joint of stillness and motion.

The world is windmill, turning and oblique.

It rattled many panes of grey.

The small, live things are thick

that fall around the through the sun and stone,

nudging the momentum and the rolling.

The traveling edge inhabits us. It almost calms

with its indifference, its hum of rods and wheels.

I never knew I loved the weight,

graze of black stones at the roadside,

revolving sun that stains with light and heat,

passes and passes again, laying the dark glaze,

the years, heavy upon heavy.

I never knew I loved so many,

their unseen falling, light upon lost light.

The white sum held up without hands.

A storm to be read later, with dreams and heat

and the memory of many palms.

I never knew I loved the work of Patricia Nelson and, by extension, of Nazim Hikmet, but now I do.

The range of these poems is capacious, giving voice to subterranean figures such as Amelia Earhart (“I bare my love of dials, tools, / ring upon silver, upward ring / aimed high in the aisle where no one passes. // Its whiteness revolves slowly / in my hand like starlight, / like water, like faith.”), Oedipus (“Everything I ran from now twists open like a flower / in an ordinary place that suddenly bares / its steepness, the blank odor in which it hid.”) and even a variety of tarot cards.

High Priestess

            —a tarot card

Narrow by narrow she rides.

Woman with a tall blue ball on her head

and a horn and another horn

and a no eye and a why eye

and a new moon through her dress.

To see her you must live in a jar

or a rock or an alphabet

or a planet balanced on a dark,

On a “why” of seed and stem and under

And made of wide by wide.

You must see white to white,

your heart stem paling at the leaf.

Face of chalk and torso hard as tooth.

In the high-low, pile moonlight silent as sand.

Release the cold and falling salt of judgment.

Nelson’s language choices in “High Priestess” would bring criticism in some poetry workshops—her anaphoric use of “and” and “or” flying in the face of compression—containing too much connective tissue of conjunctions, articles, and adjectives. But it is precisely by giving these often poetically unnecessary words priority, gathering them at the beginning of lines and piling them up to stretch the language, pointing beyond itself to enact itself: “… a ‘why’ of seed and stem and under / And made of wide by wide” that is noteworthy. And still this poet’s diction is full of horns and eyes, rocks and dresses, “Face of chalk and torso hard as tooth.” Nelson successfully negotiates the balance between the abstractions that emerge from the underworld and the concrete imagery that expresses it never more adeptly than in the title poem, the final in this collection.

Out of the Underworld

From a place of hands and blindness

the seekers come,

small and crouching like furniture.

They touch the little beaded lights

clustered in minor roundnesses

and leaning like cobs.

They call for a body unimpeded in a white, clean sky.

But their bones still hurt in the maze of sight

as if the gods of dark are heavy and are here.

There is nothing to mark, with a sharp light,

the edge of what they lost to dark

and what is simple and can be gathered.

They have reached a dimension of number, rolling,

gears and axles loud, unspeakable, repeating—

An arrival not, after all, a place to see

but a bowl of wild music, swerves of sound and meaning.

Wall and angle do not mar their seeking.

It’s the melody, the lovely, strange gradation.

Patricia Nelson is a retired attorney and environmentalist. She has worked with the “Activist” group of poets in California for many years. The group rose to prominence in the 1940s and 50s and is now undergoing a resurgence of publication by a different generation of poets. The Activist credo is that every word in a poem should be poetically “active,” employing some kind of focused poetic technique—a principle not as self-evident as it might sound. The group often works with metaphoric imagery.

Out of the Underworld may be ordered directly from the publisher HERE, or from other online sources and bookstores, including Books by the Bay in Sausalito, CA. Their website is HERE.