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At first glance this collection
seems to promise good scary fun; a decapitated Barbie stares out from the
cover with an eerie fixed smile, surrounded by orange flowers, impaled on one
of the stalks. Open up and the modern, sleek impression is carried through
with short, beat-influenced lines that focus on people and places with the
friendly enthusiasm of Frank O'Hara, and phrases like '...For years I've been
/ keeping a tally of my showers...' echo Chuck Palahniuk's neurotic prose. The
collection contains poems all, apparently, given the names of people,
although a glance through the contents page ups the kookiness factor
considerably with the choice of names: Blodwen, Deforest, Mitrofan, Ughtred,
anyone? The introduction by Lisa Jarnot, who judged the 2006 Slope Editions
Book Prize and thus gave Nadelberg the chance of publication, lays out the
approach of these poems succinctly:
Someone is
speaking to you. All those people who you ride with on
the subway,
who you stand in line with at the supermarket in the afternoon.
Maybe they
have names like this. Maybe you will find yourself here, or
your
neighbours, or the people you love.
Aside from the smile it gave me to think of which passer-by today might have
been called 'Ughtred', this description highlights an immediately prominent
aspect of Nadelberg's poetry; its prime concern is with 'the people you
love'. If strangers appear, they're ones you'll probably love too. Sometimes
this works well with her chosen style, as in the poem 'Bean':
Inside this
small
place I can
love you. Let
me
wash your
hair in
the bathroom
sink and
make you a
glass
of water with
many
cubes I
promise they
will fit...
In moments like these, where intimacy emerges from the confinement of the
domestic settings, the short lines and sudden breaks are certainly effective,
as in the opening few lines, but this technique is used far too much, and
becomes very wearing. Of these sixty-three poems, the vast majority are made
up of lines between one and seven words long, with an end-stopped line
occurring every twenty or thirty lines. In many cases these jolts are
disruptive without adding much to the poetry, giving it a 'stop-start'
feeling.
If by now you're thinking that this sounds a bit far from Barbie-head
territory, you'd be right. Despite the style, a lot of the poems are, well, a
bit 'cosy' for my liking. Nadelberg can express affection effectively, if in
a slightly twee manner, but she doesn't manage negativity as well. A good
example is 'Ella', which at first seems to show Nadelberg getting some teeth
out:
By the time
you get this the cat
will have
been dead one week.
I am sorry. I
was on the hills I
had brought a
picnic for myself
The deadpan delivery accentuates an image that definitely tickled me; the
childlike narrator goes for a picnic, precipitating the death of someone
else's cat by taking the slow road, which turns out to be blocked with snow.
The wall was
so thick and
tall. I was
stuck there it
snowed for
four days and
no one came,
everyone
must have
gone the other way.
The childlike delivery has developed into a childish helplessness and sorrow,
well portrayed in the last line but I don't find that Nadelberg's approach
makes much sense. She describes approaching a 'wall of snow, like in a
cartoon / where the rain is on one side of / the street and not the other'. Well,
if 'not the other', why not turn round? If this is because of the narrator's
childish lack of initiative, her need for someone to come along the road and
help her, then I think the poem's attitude is too rose-tinted. It is
effective in making the reader share that sense of abandonment, but this has
arisen with a degree of choice, at the price of her responsibilities. While
reading the collection I began to wonder whether Nadelberg truly has the
patience and capacity for forgiveness of a saint, or whether she's being a
touch disingenuous. Certainly if one of my friends let my pet die because
they stood on a road for four days not knowing what to do, my thoughts would
not have been on how charmingly immature they were. It seems significant that
where Jarnot talks about the 'frailties and foibles' of the characters in the
introduction, she makes no mention of 'faults', or, heaven forbid,
'failings'. Isn't knowledge of these an important part of love for another
person? Certainly to love my friends I don't need to gloss over their
weaknesses, and I know they don't overlook mine. Perhaps those of a sunnier
disposition would get more out of this (provided they don't mind the
sometimes juddery flow), for me it seems that where I see 'head on spike',
Nadelberg has been thinking 'Barbie plus flowers', which adds up to a rather
sugary mixture.
© Nicholas
Hunt 2006
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