A Country of Strangers

New and Selected Poems

A Country of Strangers
D Nurkse
RRP:
NZ$ 70.00
Our Price:
NZ$ 56.00
Hardback
h235 x 156mm - 224pg
19 Apr 2022 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9780593321409
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The selected poems of an essential American poet, who has cast a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart' s hidden stories over eleven books and thirty-five years. D. Nurkse' s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child' s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures. Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy' s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s ("Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness"). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage ("We showed her daylight in our cupped hands"), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities ("but on the streets / there was no one"), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens. Throughout this matchless career, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists-birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers-and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding.
D. NURKSE is the author of eleven previous books of poetry. His many honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review; he has taught poetry in prison, and, as Brooklyn poet laureate, in local schools and the public library system. He has also worked for human rights organizations. A resident of Brooklyn, he currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

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