Eric Nelson: Some Wonder
Wonderful surprise! I was looking through one of my bookshelves for a particular collection when I stumbled across a small book of poetry that I swear I had never seen before and had no recollection of buying. I opened it up and scanned a page or two and instantly saw why I bought it. The book, Some Wonder by Eric Nelson, is, well, wonderful! It’s engaging, amusing, thought-provoking, witty…
These are poems of shrewd and bemused observation. Consider these lines from “Fair Road”:
In the strip mall more stores
Have closed but one
Like Jesus
Is always coming soon.
How can you not love such wry wit? But of course it’s more than just tongue-in-cheek humor. In very few words, Nelson paints a picture of a corner of the world where (although he doesn’t explicitly say so) life is slower, opportunities scarcer. It’s not necessarily the South, but it kind of feels that way. The Southern landscape and mindset are often on display. Poems such as “Inside Georgia,” “Georgia Sunset,” and “The Guitars” mention Georgia directly, while many others couldn’t take place anywhere but the Atlantic south. Egrets, dogwoods, pecans, wisteria, frogs, hog-nosed snakes—all play a part as subject or backdrop to these poems. As do guns: “Gun on the Table,” “The Gun Show,” Women and Guns.” But what’s striking—and distressing—is that guns are not portrayed as a menace but as a routine commodity, like a loaf of bread. Nelson also has an affinity for dogs, though again, not your inner city junkyard dogs, but the companionable hounds that follow you around the yard, strangely intent on inhaling life’s least pleasant smells.
And then there’s chickens. Nelson has a soft spot for farmyard fowl. They feature in “Better Angels,” in which their simple, hardscrabble existence becomes a foil for the speaker’s unobtainable desires. In “I Love Chickens,” he playfully reflects on the virtues of these awkward birds, and in so doing presents a subtle commentary on human nature, needs, and priorities. The poem relies on anaphora, with each phrase completing the sentiment started in the title, “I Love Chickens”:
…Because they are flappable.
Because every night they return to their coop
And every morning they walk the plank into their day.
Because like us they brood, follow a pecking order, desire
A nest egg. Because even their shit is useful.
Nelson smoothly succeeds in what I often try to do: describe a subject in literal terms that can also be understood metaphorically. So yes, chickens literally walk along a plank to leave the coop, but for humans, “walking the plank” conjures images of pirates forcing their captives to topple overboard to their death. And the fact that they do it “every morning” like us suggests that every day when we leave the house and head to work, we are metaphorically trudging toward a kind of death. While we both may “brood,” the verb has vastly different connotations depending on the subject. Then there’s the unapologetic revelry in language. “Flappable?!?!” Well, if someone can be unflappable, it certainly follows that someone can be flappable—and who more so than chickens? Great poetry often points a lens at the absurd but grammatically valid quirks of our language.
There is a sort of deadpan comedy on display throughout the book. “Our Wars,” for example, starts out:
He was a nerd before their were nerds
But one thing you had to say for Mark—
The guy knew how to die.
The sentence is a bit shocking at first, but reading further, it becomes clear that it’s a game—young boys playing soldier, mimicking those overwrought scenes from World War II movies. Of course, we know from other poems that Nelson came of age in the Viet Nam era (and would later take part in the draft lottery), so a description of a kid pretending to get shot can’t help but suggest a real boy—probably still a teen—dying in a real war.
An elegiac streak also runs through this book, in which that wry humor turns a bit more sardonic. Several poems seem to ruminate on the untimely death of a faculty colleague in the English/writing program where Nelson teaches. In “Visiting Writer,” the poet imagines looking up from his work
To see you standing at the lectern,
Introducing the visiting writer. All that time
None of us knew you were the one visiting.
Suddenly, the title takes on a new object and meaning. “In another year” seems to be about the same person. In it, Nelson observes:
In another year the building will be filled
with students who know you
as a scholarship fund
Ouch! That’s absolutely devastating in its matter-of-fact summary. It also uses end breaks to great effect (“load every rift with ore!”). It goes on to say
Whenever they wanted explanation
You told them instead to observe
That could in fact serve as the motto of this book. It’s only natural to want reasons for the nonsensical aspects of life, but in the end, the world—no matter how predictable it can sometimes seem—is governed by random chance. True understanding is impossible—the best we can do is to observe and appreciate. Building on that, the random nature of the universe, the crazy improbability of any of it being here at all, engenders a profound sense of wonder. That’s emphasized in the title of the book, which in turn comes from the final line in “Twenty-Five O’Clock” (which is a bit more elliptical than most poems in the book—I think it refers to the “extra hour” we get from Daylight Saving each fall). The poem ends: “Some wonder what I mean. Some wonder is what.”
Interestingly, I found that I kept misstating the title of the book as “Small Wonder,” as in the phrase meaning “it’s obvious, it’s understandable.” It would be an apt title, as the phrase could be interpreted in different ways—and that’s a hallmark of Nelson’s style. In fact, the book ends with a poem called “Small Wonders” (the plural allows only one meaning), which is essentially a series of haiku-like poems that accentuate the mandate to observe the world to derive a set of truths (explanation being impossible). Our hunger for meaning may ultimately go unsatisfied, but we can marvel in the small miracles of life (as a guidepost to the large miracle of Life). My favorite:
Dogs know what to do
With the dead—
Roll in them.
Yes, those dogs always have a lesson to teach, but like Zen masters, they enlighten without saying a word.
Do yourself a favor: track down this book and spend some time reveling in its wise perspective. As the poem “Feeders” suggests: “Where you reflect, you will feed / Your hunger for wonder.” These last eight-or-so years have insidiously replaced our sense of wonder with a sense of cynicism; but I believe, underneath it all, we do still hunger for wonder.