Nod House

by Nathaniel Mackey

With Nathaniel Mackey’s fifth collection of poems, Nod House, we witness a confluence of music and meaning unprecedented in American poetry. Mackey’s art continues to push the envelope of what is possible to map and remap through words in sounds and sounds in words. Picking up with Nub’s disintegration at the end of his previous collection — the National Book Award–winning Splay Anthem — we follow a traveler and a tribe of travelers ensconced in myth and history as Mackey continues to weave his precisely measured music with two ongoing serial poems, Song of the Andoumboulou and Mu. The collec- tion is divided into two sections, both titled “Quag,” and it is this double-Quag (“Nub’s new colony Quag” or Qraq or Ouab’da or Quaph . . .) that the tribe is exiled in, worlds within alternate worlds where names and places are ever-shifting, and dreamlessness reigns. From the pyramids to the projects, Ivory Coast to Lone Coast, Lagos to Stick City, amidst chorusing horns and star-spar lightning, Nod House (“Nub’s / new / address”) unfolds as gorgeous eulogy, copla-cuts of deep song, the long elegiac march of “day after day of the dead.”

Genres: Poetry

148 pages, Paperback

First published November 21, 2011

About the author

Poet and novelist Nathaniel Mackey was born in 1947 in Miami, Florida. He received a BA degree from Princeton University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Nathaniel Mackey has received numerous awards including a Whiting Writer’s Award and a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship. He is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. Mackey currently lives in Durham, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Dylan]

It's full of heads, watermelons that bob along with heads that float on water, dirt, lots of dirt, but its static imagery plays counterpoint to micro-Coltrane like language solos: a 4th grade jazz band made from hair found inside trashcans with chicken bones & rattlesnakes backing Amiri Baraka as he talks about politics and minorities thru a car muffler.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...the aesthetic spectrum that my work comes from: the experimental, avant-garde, vanguard or difficult" - Nathaniel Mackey from a Publishers Weekly article by Craig Morgan Teicher.

This book was difficult for me because it demanded a different type of attention: a willingness to feel lost and yet continue to follow threads of possibility in meaning and sound. The worlds Mackey weaves and traverses are very particular to the sound and sensibility he derives from his own recipe of references. Some of these references include the music of Don Cherry, John Coltrane, and Fela Kuti; the art work of Bob Thompson; and "the progenitor spirits of the Dogon people of West Africa." To enter these poems you have to trust [Mackey] to guide you on a journey of constant (searching?) movement amongst realms and ancient and contemporary spaces. These travels require invented and magical uses of words, such as cimbalon, lapsarian, and chthonic; and visits to "Treadnot Hill" and sitting in "Squat Garden."

Nathaniel Mackey has published no less than nine books of poetry and at least five books of fiction. Nod House is a continuation of Splay Anthem, which won the National Book Award for poetry in 2006.