The Fall

In this elegant collection D. Nurkse elegizes a lost father a foreshortened childhood and a young marriage. From the drenched lawns of suburbia to the streets of Brooklyn he delivers up the small but crucial epiphanies that propel an American coming-of-age and chronicles the development of a tender yet exacting consciousness. As the diversions of childhood prefigure the heartbreak of adulthood Nurkse captures the exquisite sadness of each small fall that carries us further from our early innocence. In the books final section the poet turns to face mortality with a series of stirring poems about illness in midlife. Throughout Nurkse celebrates the sheer strangeness of our perceptions in a language that is both astute and surpassingly lyrical.