Some Ether

I regret having missed the opportunity to meet Nick Flynn, as he was signing books and giving a lecture about "Some Ether" at the state college where I live. Before that I had heard very little about him, and soon as I heard the word "confessional" in reference to his poetry I decided not to go. Having pored over this collection for almost a year now, I wish I could go back just to have a few words with the guy. This is not Gen-x, rehab riddled whining; it is emotionally powerful work from a man still trying to make sense of his traumatic past through the medium of poetry, which he has such a tremendous aptitude at that the subject matter ("depressing" or not) doesn't really matter. It is only confessional in the sense of being intensely private; his mother's suicide and the alcoholism of his father have become shattered mirrors which he tries to reassemble in order to gain a coherent sense of self. Right from the first poem it would be impossible not to empathize with his plight or turn away: "At the end there were straws/in her glove compartment/I'd split them open to taste the familiar bitter residue/near the end I ate all her Percodans/hungry to know how far they could take me/A bottle of red wine each night moved her along as she wrote/"I feel too much", again and again/You asked how and I said, Suicide, and you asked/how and I said, An overdose, and then she shot herself/and your eyes filled with wonder/so I added/In the chest, so you wouldn't think/her face was gone/and it mattered/somehow/that you knew this. . ." Flynn manages to make some sense of his horrific childhood in his later poetry, but "Some Ether" is more a masterful exorcism of personal demons. This is not "Young and Depressed In America" or anything like the self pitying trash that lines the bookshelves these days. Flynn does not ask for undue entitlement, only that we listen.

This may be considered a bias review since I had a class under Nick Flynn's wing, but unlike my other professors, his poetry is deeply resounding and touching. From the reviews I read, it's disappointing that people think his poetry suffers because it doesn't play with the form or offer anything new. Even if he is "confined," he does it very well. The poem Bag of Mice is just simply beautiful. Its brevity, emotion, and honesty should be appreciated. While the mother-complex may tire some readers, there are others such as Cartoon Physics and No Map that kept me interested. I recommend all beginning poets should study Flynn's book and appreciate good poetry.

I read most of the first books of poetry that come out, but this is the one I keep coming back to. I think it's fairly easily the best first book in the last ten years or so. Some dislike it, I know, because it's autobiographical, sincere and a times maybe a bit sentimental--things many first book poets, indoctrinated in a fear of "subjectivity" by their MFA programs and the editorial preferences of magazines edited by Iowa/New York hipsters, would rather die than risk being accused of. So this isn't yet another book striving to be linguistically or philosophically experimental (whether or not after Stein, Pound, Ashbery and the other modernists and postmodernists such writing is actually hopelessly derivative) or which guards its emotions like a Catholic school girl guards her virginity. This is simply work which sooner or later is going to crowd most everybody else off the table.

Nick Flynn's day-job is training teachers and teaching writing to young people as a member of Columbia University's Writing Project. Some Ether is a collection of impressive poetry that documents a major talent for this award winning poet. Radio Thin Air: Keep the radio on softly/so it sounds like two people in the next/room, maybe/your parents, speaking calmly about something/important--a lock/of cash, the broken/cellar pump. Marconi believed/we are wrapped in voices, that waves/never die, merely space themselves/farther & farther apart,/passing through the ether he imagined/floating the planets. But wander/into the kitchen & no one/will be there, the tiny red eye of the radio, songs/that crawl through walls,/voices pulled from air. Marconi/wanted to locate the last song/the band on the deck of the Titanic played,/what Jesus said/on the cross, he kept dialing/the frequency, staring across the Atlantic,/his ear to the water,/there, can you hear it?

SOME ETHER is a beautifully rendered and powerful account of Nick Flynn's journey up to and after the suicide of his mother. The poems are immediate and clear and stay with the reader long after the last page has been read.