Nick Laird

1 5 3 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R American poets today often remind us of other American poets. Few stand apart, chiefly because for now the common ground on which they stood in the first place has shrunk. The traditional commonality is a matter of form and technique, the mainstay of which is prosody, and today meter has given way to free verse, which, though it encourages idiosyncratic lineation, undermines uniqueness. In lieu of attention to form and technique, we have – what we have always had, but in addition – attention to content, determined in large part by point of view or sociopolitical orientation . The points of view are many, in proportion to the practitioners of poetry, the number of whom is surely at a historical high, exiguous though the professional rewards might be. The MFA programs that fructified in the last half of the twentieth century are hardly withering on the vine, hélas and hooray, and there are more kinds of poetry than ever before. That is perhaps the point in small. When all stand apart, none do. But that is all hypothesis and generalization. And to generalize Fe e l F r e e , by Nick Laird (Norton, 80 pp., $15.95 paper) 1 5 4 Y E N S E R Y is to be an idiot, as Blake declared – albeit in a blatant generalization . Whether or not it is significant that Nick Laird is not American but Northern Irish, Feel Free, his fourth volume, sounds like nothing by any of his American contemporaries, although a few American poets of his generation are of comparable independence. While there are established American poets not long deceased who similarly elude categorization and whose work Laird’s calls to mind, the emulation of eminent predecessors without embarrassment is itself a distinguishing strength. Feel Free stands out today partly because of its formal and technical command and partly because of its conflicting desiderata: its poems want to be at once economical and impulsive, controlled yet digressive. His verse, his sensibility, itself thrives on contrariness. ‘‘I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed,’’ he o√ers in his title poem – at the same time that the poem asserts its own agency, an element in the contrariness – and ‘‘I like a steady disruption.’’ It is characteristic that the preceding phrase undercuts itself. What can one make of a principle of dependable upset? Laird makes an inspiring abundance of it. Along the way he flirts with venerable forms. A number of the poems here are sonnet length, but none executes a complete traditional scheme, and while tercets and quatrains are frequent, end rhyme is scarce. At arm’s length, the poems are conventionally shapely, with lines (like the stanzas and sections) of more or less the same length. The meter is flexible within those rough visual limits, however, and a strict formalist Laird is not. True, he gives us ‘‘Parenthesis,’’ which opens with a notably unpromising stanza – I lie here like the closing bracket on the ledger of the mattress. Asleep between us the children are hyphens – one hyphen, one underscore – and it takes a few moments at five a.m. to get it quite straight that what I thought was my name being called is the dog at my feet snoring – but turns out to be a fetchingly ingenious pantoum, a form as di≈cult to handle as a batch of clothes hangers. But for the most part, Laird’s means of getting along, his modus operandi, involves P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 5 5 R a nonce structure, the purpose of which is to accommodate diverse subjects and perspectives – a structure or framework amenable to extravagance, in that term’s root sense. As he puts it vividly in ‘‘Crunch,’’ ‘‘I say poetry is weather for the mind, not an umbrella.’’ It is perhaps suggestive that the poet who gets the most exposure in Feel Free is Cinna. Made famous for many a...