Celebrations of Brooklyn

Detail from Cover

D. Nurkse’s A Night in Brooklyn and Steven Sher’s Grazing on Stars are two books that owe their origin and much of their content to Brooklyn, New York. Both authors have lived there. While these books are very different, the notion of “home” affects both volumes, Nurkse’s directly and Sher’s more tangentially, but each, in their own profound way, celebrate the borough.

The first section of D. Nurkse’s new collection ends with the relatively brief poem “A Night in Brooklyn.” It is a poem that gives its title to the whole work and which takes us to a place where “in that narrow bed / we built a great city.” It is an imagined city, an “other” built “using only the palms of our hands / and the tips of our tongues.” The couple creates not only an alternative city and an imagined map that includes an imagined continent, but they create both night and daybreak, and “when the sun rose / we had to take it all to pieces / for there could be only one Brooklyn.” The impulse to be elsewhere while at the same time observing a determined loyalty to New York’s second largest borough is one of the several themes of the volume, and that loyalty is deep: It derives from a profound acknowledgement of the meaning of home, a home where one walked “down leafy avenues, / etched with the faint double line / of extinct trolleys,” a home where the past is ever present.

One element of that loyalty is that many of the poems are situated in one of the numerous neighborhoods and streets of Brooklyn: Flatlands, Canarsie, Flatbush, Bensonhurst, and Greenpoint are only a few. Hardly anything is revealed about the nature of these neighborhoods. It is as though their names provide an anchor for the varied experiences of the narrators. While these names appear as a binding to place and an assertion of home, it is the telling of the lives lived in these poems that create an idea of place: That place is not one which only the dead may know but one in which the struggle for love and work is alive and described with power.

These poems are a pleasure to read; re-reading them provides an even greater delight. In the early poems, the experience is of a young man growing into adulthood by way of blue-collar jobs and awakening to love, sex, and a sense of self. “[I]t was still twilight, a cricket / singing I, I, not furiously, / but with a cool insistence, / and I understood how the universe / was created.” In these poems, the word “twilight” makes its appearance, not often, but with sufficient regularity so that the notion of ambiguity or decline might be summoned as an underlying motif. Indeed, right in the second poem, “Making Shelves,” a once-young blue-collar worker remembers a time of hard factory labor, not in stereotypical Brooklynese, but in a tone that refers to a decline in class. The worker’s life is central to this section, and Nurkse inhabits these lives well, describing a life where “behind the tenements lay wild gardens” and where a house painter, having observed a rich post-coital couple, makes plain his blue-collar resentment. In each of these sharply observed worker poems, whether it is the sour apprenticeship in “Fourteen Months in the Handbag Factory” or in a bar where he topped “off drafts with a paddle for the St. Johnsbury truckers,” these poems are enlarged with stories of love and the contentions of lovers in moving dramas that never undermine the observed life but rather enrich it.

In this first section, despite the multiple attachments to Brooklyn, there are multiple allusions to leaving it. The next to last poem begins, “I love my life, she says, / but really I would like to be elsewhere.” In two...