I had a remarkable reaction from the moment I read the first poem in Nancy Krygowski's 2006 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize-winning collection Velocity. It was simply: Why haven't I heard of her before? If you've read her work, then you know what I mean. And you've probably already bought and devoured this hauntingly gorgeous collection of poems. If you haven't, stop reading. Go order this book now.
I don't often have this reaction to new books of poems. Often, I have a ho-hum reaction, a pale respect, or sometimes flat-out anger toward new books of poetry. I hear Marianne Moore whispering, "I, too, dislike it . . . ," as I browse the orphaned collections in my neighborhood bookstore. But here is a book that reminds me why I love poetry. Here's a poet for whom craft and voice come together in powerful and stunning ways.
The title poem, "Velocity," is a masterful poem in its own right, but also creates an enormous and subtle landscape from and toward which all of the poems in the book hurtle. The intermingling of plain-spoken narration, amazingly subtle line breaks, an equally subtle and blazingly off-kilter recitation of facts, and the use of repetition (as though in shock) creates an immediacy and a palpable sense of survived trauma within the first few lines:
I was riding my bike
on a road in Georgia. Weeds
and ditches, trees, me and solitude,
the heat. I was 16, in love
with speed, long hair trailing behind
like a visible wind.
I was happy. I was 16.
Then two men in a truck.
We all know what wind means:
Free. Two men and me.
The sun was sinking. I was 16.
The one in the passenger seat
reached out to grab
the wind. No use
describing the jerk of
my head, the scream.
I was 16. I lived.
While much of this book wrestles with making sense of tremendous loss---in fact, the first poem of the book sets the theme in its title, "This Loss;Any;," Krygowski is wrestling with the terrible dislocations, wondrous beauties, and impossible complexities of life far more than with death. In "Bottle of Hate, Bottle of Sun," she describes a moment that for most would be out of reach for language. A group of young black kids are up to teenage trouble, standing in the middle of the road when a white male driver swerves dangerously to avoid them.
He doesn't yell. Drives home
Glass of ice water, can of soup.
Some hates
quiet us, leave us
delicate and stiff
as a bird's curved beak.
I don't know that I've ever read anything like this before. I had this sense that I've waited much of my life for her words to explain such dreadful and overlooked feelings. Later in the poem, she implicates herself in such feelings as she dreams often of drowning a boy who called her fat on the beach. She was there while taking a break from caring for her dying sister (a central theme of the book). She then returns to the street kids, describing one who's about to smash a bottle in the street:
One of the street boys
carries a glass bottle
shiny as his dark
swerving eyes.
How can laughter
not be about happiness?
This is a book of urgency by a poet who is serious, searching, and hauntingly honest and loving about the world. The usual tricks of poetry, the devices of intentional obfuscation, of seeming sobriety, when in fact the poet is really avoiding, or showing off, are nowhere to be seen here. This is a true, accomplished and breathtakingly gorgeous book. Krygowski's end to her collection says it all:
I love these beautiful things
-David Rees
I love putting words together.
And I love all this listening,
which isn't just in my head,
which is heaven.