The Nurseryman

by Arthur W. Allen

Fiction. Poetry. Hybrid Genre. Winner of the Eyelands Book Award for Best Published Poetry Book of 2019. THE NURSERYMAN is a verse novel told in polyphony as the collected account of a 17th Century voyage to Meta Incognita--the absolutely unknown ice-land at the top of the world. A composite of original sources and collected accounts of medieval voyages, THE NURSERYMAN is a postmodern travel compendium that explores the hidden, magical worlds within our own.

Genres: Poetry

140 pages, Paperback

Published July 16, 2019

About the author

ARTHUR ALLEN is a British-Canadian poet currently reading for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. His debut verse-novel, The Nurseryman (Kernpunkt Press, 2019), won the 2020 Eyelands Book Awards Poetry Prize, and was awarded third place in the Charter Oak Historical Award 2018. His poetry has previously appeared in several international publications including: Ambit, Amsterdam Quarterly, The Bombay Review, Cake, New Scottish Writing 38 and the Tahoma Literary Review.

Reviews

[L.]

...dark Northland
the man-eating, the
fellow-drowning place...

This is not an easy read—neither mentally nor visually. This book is about as dyslexia unfriendly as it gets. It's not bad per se, but it takes a bit to be intelligible. Far as I can tell, it's a story about a plant scientist-cum-alchemist who goes on an exploratory mission and whose crew ends up finding a cold, inhabitable but also magical land? Think the Odyssey meets the Lost City of Z (Again, best I can tell...).

My main issue with the work is that it needed a heavier editorial hand (in my opinion—this whole review is super subjective). It was quite hard to tell which syntactical/grammatical errors were due to the text trying to be an in-world 17th-century English translation of a 16th-century scientific text (collection of texts?) (which would have presumably been written in Latin). Like, e.g., in all but one instance, "its" is stylized as "it's." Is that because the narrator (Note: of which it was hard to figure out how many there were in total) didn't know differently or the author? It's almost certainly the former, given the author is getting his PhD. The book is also inconsistent with its faux-historical misspellings (for example, switching between "ice" and "yce"). It was hard to figure out if that was indicative of switching voices or not (the examples I'm thinking of show up in the same set of journalistic cantos).

This is a work in which the symbols and allusions make more sense than the literal plot. We see Neptune, e.g., be both a ship and the sea god. The moments in which the book tries less hard to be a mock-historical recounting of some super profound revelation are the times that I found it the most enjoyable. The simpler cantos ring a bit more true and timeless.

(a monster came sailing, wondrous
upon the wave / it called out it's comliness
to the land; it's laughter / was terrible,
it's edges were sharp.)

[Sic]

Fundamentally, this is a story of mixed mythology. Off the top of my head, Christian, Greek, Roman, Norse, and Russian gods/myths/mythical creatures are mentioned. I truly wanted to like it. I went into it craving a fabulist story written in a creative medium, but I found that lines like "the nipple of the world" just didn't do it for me.

As a side note, if this gets a reprint, I'm begging the publisher to make a distinction between en and em dashes. Such a little change would lead to much easier parse-ability re: all the enjambment.

(Not giving a rating because just because it's not for me and my tastes doesn't mean it's objectively bad. Would be better in a classroom setting for sure. I can see MFAs devouring this.)