The Heat from It

We are born into biases and through our biases we see everything on a slant. Our thoughts slope down into unavoidable and irredeemable space.

I am compelled to announce this at the onset because I will be saying some words that may seem kind, but which I see merely as factual, about a book of poetry. Yet it is not just any book. It is not a book that is somehow anonymous to me and which I must learn to accept into the marrow of my bones. It is a book made out of that marrow, a book by my wife Nancy, a book designed (I herewith admit) by me, a book that I saw created poem by poem, each clawed out of the think clay of a life I shared with Nancy, each filled with more imagination than my veins are filled with blood. A book called Radiator. So I may exhibit biases here, but I think I have enough of an ear to detect the work of someone who has an ear, and I am surprised by what Nancy does, even something as simple, or simply impossible as

iris maple bird's eye pear we are dust

which is a line from the book, yet more importantly a line to me. And the book includes a thank-you to me as well, so I can't pretend I'm not personally connected to the book.

Yet let me think through the book for a few moments.

Nancy surprises me by always being the poet no-one else can be. She is not simply a lyric poem of the all-seeing I, though she sometimes writes from that perspective and though her life intervenes in these poems. She is a poet whose language is so unique that she reminds us the language we are using every day. Her vocabulary is decidedly Anglo-Saxon, focused on monosyllabic clumps of sound almost unique to English, words like "clump," "scrunched," "squint," and "click." Yet her vocabulary is restless, imaginative. She drags a wide net behind her, so she can pull all the words close to her and use them as she can.

The way fire
extends a wall
the way syllables are
dropped and days
clapped
and Xed
just
to make sure

Sometimes the idea
sometimes container

I read over words set in a sequence like this, and I am impressed by their apparent simplicity, by how much information is packed into them, by how the lines break tells us how to think about them, by how this is a voice, a real human voice speaking to us, but one that is heightened, the vibrant voice of a person alive and thinking and speaking out as if she were actually a real person and not just the voice of a poem.

Sometimes hers is a humorous voice:

when grey cartoony fingers
poked again into the many
oozy spots of her house
drawing themselves a chair
at her dining room table
squeezing into her morning shower
making her thoughts slippery
as soap or
nuzzling into her bed
it was a bit
too much.

Still, you can always hear the way sounds work their ways through her poems, how their jagged metrical patterns give rise to unexpected meaning, how she plays with the voice she has put in our heads. Listen to how the oo's that open this snippet from a poem list into the z's that finish the poem off and merge with the s's to be the sounds of her morning shower. Whoever that "her" refers to.

Her poems are contraptions of sound and she plays them as someone else might sing a song, but Nancy is a metaphysical poet, in the end. Hers are poems of thinking, of observation, of thinking again and thinking through, of telling the story that tells us what it all means.

Surveying where she sat
suddenly it all made sense
fixt foot remembering a voice
clear like nutmeg like cut grass like
bare foot on stone
asking as no one else ever did
how do you want it how
do you want me how do you wish
it were?

It is clear that I cannot do these poems any justice tonight, that the pieces I've pulled out of the book are touchstones but they float outside the context of their poems, their contraptions of sounds, so I'm ending this little announcement with the two blurbs that grace the back cover of the book, because these tell much more about the book than I can, than I have, than anyone as biased but clear-eared as me can do.

Nancy Huth's Radiator is a fiercely stubborn book comprised of precisely realized palimpsests and composite ghosts. Quotidian in its impetus, working out from the worries and delights of everyday life, utterly riveting in its fugue-like realizations, this volume limns a domestic metaphysics in situ which is suffused with sadness, wisdom and sense perceptions. Add to that the moments within it that one might want to dance to. I love this book. It's a sleeper bomb. It reads quietly but won't go away. It sticks with you like the tattoo you didn't know that you needed.

—Tom Beckett

NF Huth is a dweller in language—she moves strategically forward making text Huthily hers, an architecture she invites us to inhabit. "I sniff the baseboards for a plan." Words like scrunch, clanking, hissing, pokes, pointy, clacking, stony, squint, squeak—become the small sounds made just before tectonic plates shift. (domesti)Cities made in dust, in partially seen images of the viewed lover in a steamy bathroom shower. These gossamer intangibles of dailyness finally become ours in this book. "Certainly now: this parenthetical life" becomes as important a place for our waking territories as our woken ones. This is a book to hold close.

—Anne Gorrick 

These two readers can hear her. And now the rest of us have to.

_____

Huth, NF. Radiator. Laughing/Ouch/Cube/Publications: Chilwell, Notingham, U.K., and Claremont, Calif., 2011. US$16.95/£11

ecr. l'inf.