REVIEWS OF BOOK

Why remember the dead?” poet Kathy Nelson begins this sobering meditation, a descent and rise through what’s lost and sometimes found again, her keen eye on the natural world, her mother in the Bardo and in life, both trouble and love restored, unshakable grief, regret, triumph, mystery… And why exactly? Because we need these poems as lens, as touchstone. And such lovely, startling interventions of language and image! Vivid detail, layer upon layer—say, a “landscape stitched with fencerows,” or to hold a breath “until someone unlocks the door.” That someone is this most remarkable poet. “Last night,” Nelson writes, “I found a hidden stairway leading down/into a maze of rooms …” And what a rewarding gift for all of us, to follow her there.

• MARIANNE BORUCH, Bestiary Dark

Kathy Nelson’s Ledger of Mistakes presses loss and regret into beautiful shapes, into poems that can talk and sing and unexpectedly succumb, all at once.  A poet writing a ledger is a poet given to accounting, a poet who doesn’t want to forget. Dimensioned as the contours of Precambrian rock, these detailed poems feel simultaneously wise and true; they are both formally accomplished and emotionally rife. Kathy Nelson has written a masterful first book, a treatise on the complication of loss. Like the speaker at the end of “Easter, 1956,” these poems allow the reader to marvel “at the possibilities of flight” an experience I cherish and shall repeat.

• SALLY KEITH, River House

A superb example of a poetic sequence that unfolds non-linearly, Kathy Nelson’s collection brings several narrative lines into a pleasing cohesiveness, the strongest tether being the emotional narrative of a complicated relationship between the collection's speaker and her mother. While there is evidence of maternal tenderness withheld, there is also evidence of love displayed which makes evident Nelson's deft handling of her subjects. Her observant eye offers us vivid and stirring scenes, for instance, "I awoke from numb forgetting, remembered—/ oh, the longing—a daughter I’d never known,/ lost in the night. On the horizon, beacons shone,/ but I stumbled in a canyon of talus slopes and boulders./ I never had the dream again and it’s just as well./ A person could be destroyed by such hopelessness./ I have been my mother and I have been my daughter."

• MARTHA RHODES, The Thin Wall

Why remember the dead?" forms the opening line to a poetry collection that embraces the writer's lifelong relationship with her mother. Memories of trying times, cherished moments, youth, aging, final hours, and eventual loss - form a vivid landscape to tread across, stop and observe, pause and feel, and relate. This is honest terrain. Perhaps this is why the dead should not be forgotten. They are embedded in us. What they have given us and what they leave for us, we have become. As the poet writes: "gone now / she inhabits me-”.

• JUROR’S COMMENT, Eric Hoffer Award Committee