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  • Love and its Obstacles
  • Gardner McFall (bio)
Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult
D. Nurkse
Alfred A. Knopf
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549019/love-in-the-last-days-by-d-nurkse/
104 Pages; Print, $27.00

For nearly thirty years, D. Nurkse has written seriously and prolifically about common human experience (marriage, divorce, the birth of his first child, death of his parents, illness, surgery) as well as world events (the draft, the Iraq War, 9/11), but his recurring, most powerful preoccupation has been love, which is masked and distilled in his eleventh volume, a book-length poetic sequence, Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult. Choosing to reinterpret the twelfth century story of the tragic lovers Tristan and Iseult during the "last days" (presumably human kind's last days) allows the poet to posit the supremacy of love across time as well as the nature of the last days, with its harsh intolerance for passionate, transgressive love. It also shows that love burns fiercest with obstacles in its path. While it helps to have a copy of Joseph Bedier's The Romance of Tristan and Iseult (tr. Hilaire Belloc [2005]) and Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World (tr. Montgomery Belgion [1956]) when reading the book, it's not imperative since, as de Rougemont states: "There is no reason to have read Beroul's Tristan or M. Bedier's, and no need to have heard Wagner's opera, in order to undergo in the course of everyday life the nostalgic domination of such a myth . . . The myth operates wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared like a malignant fever."

Still, several points in de Rougemont's book concerning the Tristan myth are borne out in Nurkse's twenty-first century retelling: 1) "Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself;" 2) Passion involves suffering; and 3) "Suffering and understanding are deeply connected; death and self-awareness are in league." In Love in the Last Days as well as Bedier's version of the story, Tristan and Iseult's passion derives from a love potion they mistakenly drink as Tristan sails to take the Irish princess Iseult to marry his uncle and liege, King Mark of Cornwall. Yoking imagery to theme, Nurkse ascribes to the potion a flavor of "honey and bile," foretelling the couple's love and doom, though he suggests the pair is attracted to each other before they ever taste it. Tristan says: "Her high cheek bones made me slightly seasick. / I concentrated on her faults, as Ovid advises. / A mole on her cheek. But that was what fascinated me." De Rougemont calls the philtre "passion's alibi," the excuse for their ship-board affair and adultery at court. Although Tristan and Iseult's love is transgressive by conventional standards, which gives the story its tragic arc, Nurkse's volume pits love against the law; the reader can easily conclude that love is a higher calling, holding within it the possibility of love's existence beyond time, in eternity or Avalon, the enchanted island where the lovers presumably reunite after death.

Love inthe Last Days, dedicated tothememory of Marc Bloch, comprises thirty-nine poems, mostly monologues, divided into a prelude (told by a harper), four sections dedicated to the advancing story, and a coda which returns to the harper, who is tortured to death for being "a chronicler of heretic adulterers." Most of the monologues are Tristan's, though Iseult speaks in several, one of which is titled "Everyone in This Story Speaks Except Me." Nurkse gives monologues to the animals, landscape, and inanimate objects so the volume never bogs down in ponderous narration, but advances through a bristling juxtaposition of perspectives. Any person, creature, or thing in a position to have a view about the lovers has a voice, including Iseult's servant Brangien; the Leper to whom the king gives Iseult as punishment for her infidelity; Tristan's horse Beau Jouer that carries the lovers into Morois; Tristan's loyal dog Houdain; the...

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