Rag & Bone

by
Kathryn Nuernberger

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Rag & Bone

by Kathryn Nuernberger

4.58 of 5 stars 4.58 · rating details · 12 ratings · 2 reviews

Poetry. Winner of the 2010 Antivenom Poetry Award. Contest judge, Jane Satterfield, had this to say about RAG & BONE: "This is a poetry of pain and power...whether describing the precise coloration of fruit skin, the contours of memory, or secrets of Fatima which turn out to be 'cryptic mumbo jumbo, ' RAG & BONE reveals complicated truths with rare eloquence and wi...more

Paperback, 80 pages

Published April 15th 2011 by Elixir Press

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Feb 27, 2013 Literary Review The rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kathryn Nuernberger
Rag & Bone

The memory of riding through Tuscany this summer in the back of a Peugeot while reading Kathryn Nuernberger’s first collection of poems, Rag & Bone, should not illicit sentimental longing for that very book, but it does. I left it in the last rental car or in the lobby of that last hotel before flying back to the States. My loss isn’t just the loss of an award-winning collection of poetry (2010 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award). By the end of my three-week...more Kathryn Nuernberger
Rag & Bone

The memory of riding through Tuscany this summer in the back of a Peugeot while reading Kathryn Nuernberger’s first collection of poems, Rag & Bone, should not illicit sentimental longing for that very book, but it does. I left it in the last rental car or in the lobby of that last hotel before flying back to the States. My loss isn’t just the loss of an award-winning collection of poetry (2010 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award). By the end of my three-week trip, Nuernberger’s book was full of scribbled notes that included directions, festival notes, my observations of Rome and Tuscany, not to mention countless notes about the poems I was reading while friends drove or I baked in the sun in our villa’s pool in between outings. I lost part of my summer by losing this book. I had notes for future poems, recipes, names of wine I didn’t want to forget, names of quaint hotels, villages where the produce market moved, and ideas for articles. Once home, I ordered another copy. However, its clean pages were intimidating. Each poem contained a nagging déjà vu of the passing Tuscany countryside or the smell of wine, bread, and prosciutto, or that afternoon we hunkered down when a thunderstorm rolled across Sinalunga.

Nuernberger’s collection combines poems with metaphoric, fairy-tale-like characters with poems that examine the work of scientists. Myth and science. Observable fact and interpretation. The juxtaposition is a perfect mnemonic to my lost notes.

In Italy, too, there is this type of copacetic incongruity between the old and the new. WiFi in ancient villas, reconditioned with modern fixtures; wood-burning outdoor ovens and Smart cars. There is a sense that certain things like bread and wine and walls are perfect and need no improvement, while other things like trains, solar power, cars, and computers improve with relish. In this way, the country offers less angst for the poet, less subject matter to decry, but more for a good life.

It is difficult to say what I really lost as my scribbled notes have receded into the murky space of things forgotten, lost, or deleted. And it hits me, reading “Translations,” that maybe what I lost was a translation of sight. Nuernberger writes:

I want to believe we can’t see anything we don’t have a word for. When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green, I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also electrically flecked with white and I mean green in its damp way of glowing off a leaf.

The title “Translations” refers not to the written or spoken word but to the visual world of imagery and color. It’s a refreshing twist on the interpretation of sight. It strikes me as the opposite of Aristotle’s impulse to name and classify with such clarity. In Nuernberger’s world, the observed has many potential names. Hers is a curious ego at work, a liberal eye. Here, messy disorganized searching seems closer to truth than an aesthetic of perfect order.

In Rag & Bone, there are many moments of friction between science and poetry, between what I might call “wholeness” and what might be called “separation.” The opening poem “Ragged Edge” recounts two scientific experiments with beheaded monkeys having their heads stitched onto another monkey’s body, blood vessel to blood vessel. The project is pronounced successful when one monkey is able to bite the hand of the assistant, since, as Nuernberger observes, “[O]ne sign of life is the defense / of whatever body you have left.” In the same poem, images of chimpanzees “swinging in ritualized arcs over a great waterfall” (evidence of artistic expression?) juxtapose photographs of the stitched-together monkeys as scientific act. The narrator reacts in the poem’s closing: “You can’t help but recoil, to use the words horror or vulgarity. It’s not unlike staring at pornography—.” Yet what is vulgar here is the scientist at work, putting together that which he has taken apart.

In the same vein, another poem, “U.S. EPA Reg. No. 524-474,” exposes the wanton carelessness of bioengineering: “Have you seen what can be done with tobacco and fireflies?” the poet asks. Then states, “Salmon-tomatoes clutch their fishy gloss against the pinch of frost.” Waxing more ludicrously, the narrator one-ups the gene splicers: “I made peppermint termites to sweeten the swarm,” and “I shot scorpion tails into the fighting fish, and now I’ve made a bullet of me to blast into your amber eye. Will you come out simpering like a girl?” It is both a response to the gift of a gun and an evisceration of genetic manipulation. Nuernberger’s ability to critically dress-down (and perhaps ruin, if poetry had more cultural power) a subject by mere observation is her talent.

Losing the first copy of Nuernberger’s poems was not the crisis I imagined. All the important things are seared into my mind. Rereading Nuernberger reminds me that names are less important than the essence of the object or place. As Jane Satterfield says in the introduction to Rag & Bone, “[I]t is the poet’s sacred duty to remember and restore. In salvage lie magic and mystery.”

-- D.H. Hall
Rag & Bone was reviewed in The Literary Review. "The Lives of Saints" Fall 2011(less)

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Aug 28, 2011 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Kate is a friend of mine and an excellent poet.

Her poems are often about oddities: scientific, spiritual, serendipitous. This book is full of curiosities that are funny and unsettling (facts about Renaissance-era anatomists, deer's jawbones, tiny knife-throwers), but I'm most impressed with the larger explorations of motherhood and what I see as a kind of energetic agnosticism.

Seeing worn-out, quotidian, worrisome things and experiences anew (and askew) seems to be Kate's project, and her reli...more

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Mar 29, 2013 Jeffrey Tigchelaar rated it 5 of 5 stars

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Shelves: poetry

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Shelves: poetry

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Shelves: poetry

Oct 06, 2011 Ellie rated it 5 of 5 stars

May 23, 2011 Maya rated it 5 of 5 stars

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