A Country of Strangers

<b><b>In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics our places and our heart&#146;s hidden stories.</b></b><br><br>D. Nurkse&#146;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&#146;s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.<br>&#160;<br>Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy&#146;s baseballs thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (&#147;Secretly I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness&#148;). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (&#147;We showed her daylight in our cupped hands&#148;) while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (&#147;but on the streets / there was no one&#148;) and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens.<br>&#160;<br>Throughout this matchless career over eleven books Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists&#151;birdsong moonrise illness water towers&#151;and the complexity of human perception our stumble forward through it toward understanding.