A Country of Strangers

In an illuminating collection of selected poems over thirty-five years, one of our most essential American poets casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart’s hidden stories.

D. Nurkse’s immigrant parents met on a boat out of Europe in 1940; he was a child of the generation whose anxieties were forged in the shadow of Hiroshima and the aftermath of WWII. His poems extend that child’s dignified ignorance into an open encounter with the cataclysms of the latter twentieth century and with family structures.
 
Whispers of the old country of Estonia provide the backdrop for the boy’s baseballs, thrown in the fading twilight of the 1950s (“Secretly, I was proudest of my skill / at standing alone in the darkness”). The young man explores sexual passion and the arrival of a child in a young marriage (“We showed her daylight in our cupped hands”), while the mature poet writes of loneliness and community in our cities (“but on the streets / there was no one”), and the urgent need for us to keep expressing our will as citizens.
 
Throughout this matchless career, over eleven books, Nurkse has crafted visceral lines that celebrate the fragility of what simply exists—birdsong, moonrise, illness, water towers—and the complexity of human perception, our stumble forward through it toward understanding. One of Library Journal's Best Poetry Books of the Year

"This substantial volume gathers work from Nurske's 35-year career to make the case that he is, quietly, one of our most engaged civic poets, even as he honors interior lives and emotional complexity." —The New York Times

"[A] generous retrospective of Nurkse's work . . . plus twenty-nine new poems—documents the passage of a quiet American life moved to speech by generation-defining events . . . providing a blueprint for the labyrinth of human affairs through which the poet finds—or may fail to find—a singular, personal connection with his times." —The Manhattan Review

"Memorable. . . . Nurkse’s poems are as fresh and bizarre as ever, lingering at checkpoints, border crossings, transit areas, and 'that uncertain moment/ between false dawn and dawn.' Nurkse’s portraits . . . are skillful sketches." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"To read D. Nurkse’s A Country of Strangers is to walk the roads of never-ending war, the words illuminated by the light of whistling rockets or blown up by bombs. This collection tells the truth of war in lyrical language—how it both follows and leaps ahead even as we think we will escape it, how it lives inside us even during peace time. These poems are shrouded in darkness; they reflect both the poet’s alienation from and his love for his fellow citizens. He makes it clear that although we will never completely know each other’s truest thoughts, we may somehow find hope in these bombed-out forests of words. America is lucky that Nurkse tells such truths, bears such witness with such grace." —Big City Lit

"Nurkse enshrines intimate and political vignettes into poetic myths and inscribes culture and language in the palimpsest of history." —World Literature Today

"Nurkse muses knowingly on life and loss, offering intimate, intelligent work with a strong sense of place. The new poems reflect strikingly on loosening bonds and life's diminishing returns in melancholy-mellow verse but remain alert to the world." —Library Journal

"D. Nurkse is a strange, daring poet. . . Nurkse's compelling, unusual voice . . . resists acceptance, an easy embrace, insists on its otherness, even remoteness, while pursuing its parallel realms, so persuasive and engaging, so workably close. Orienting and disorienting, offering a bare, glinting beauty. He deserves to be read and discussed as an important American voice." —Richard Silberg, Poetry Flash

"What a joy to have this overview of D. Nurske's marvelous poems - he is a master of lyric mode, one in whose hands the lines come immediately come alive, magic breathes, nuance shimmers and becomes the world all its own, see the doors open into the unknown and we see that it is strangely familiar because strangeness is, in fact, our first language, one we mouthed before words. Welcome to A Country of Strangers, reader--don't be surprised if by the time you finish this terrific book you might feel changed, and at home." —Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in OdessaD. NURKSE is the author of eleven previous books of poetry. His many honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review; he has taught poetry in prison, and, as Brooklyn poet laureate, in local schools and the public library system. He has also worked for human rights organizations. A resident of Brooklyn, he currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College. A Country of Strangers: New Poems

Order to Dispersefor the students

Tonight my children are facing live ammunition.

One holds a rock, one brought a Bible, one hides a phone.

The fires of the provocateurs burn so brightly.

The police put duct tape over their badges.

The soldiers are hooded; they wear no insignia.

Last night they had rubber bullets, tonight hollow-point.

In the smoke you see the outlines of a bank, a cathedral,

absent as the profiles of Presidents on coins.

A voice advances, a voice retreats, someone aims.

Have you ever died in a dream? What happened then?

Tell me what happened! There is only one life.

How long will I hold mine like water in cupped hands?

The Detentions

In death too there are great cities, streets of padlocked binderies under rain that tastes of piss, cathedrals with bricked-in windows, garages lit by droplights, tenements with narrow stairs covered by linoleum treads worn smooth as the ball of a thumb. Catch your breath on any landing: a heart or a name will be scratched into the wall.

Here too is the dim room where lovers test each other, as you push against the slats of a fence, word after word, caress after caress. Here too you hear cars whoosh in the distance, crazily absent, and lights cross the ceiling, as if a child flung a handful of rice. A scrap of passing music calls you, more intimate than a voice.

Here too a red glare pulses and someone shouts. Again you look down from a great height. Is the man in cuffs drunk? Why is he staggering? Again you have to decide: do I yell out the window and show where I live? Do I take a video on my cell? Where would I send it? Do I run down those endless flights, into the street, waving my hands and commanding no? Would I at least be able to memorize the license plate? Would it be blank?

Even at the end of death. Prepare yourself. Even where there is no I. No judgment, no reward.

Only the long street, the gray rain, the boarded shops, a few passersby, their eyes kept down, the lamps shining inward.

In the City of Statues

When we were old and knew
we would never see Canaan
we woke in the same breath
dressed shivering, gulped instant,
and trudged to the rally point
with our Magic Marker pasteboard
to chant ourselves speechless
though we did not believe the slogans
and the crowd was all strangers—
(once we saw a child who looked
like you forty years ago and once
young lovers with our own grievance
and resolve)—facing us, batons,
gas canisters, hoses, stun guns,
grenades, and the strange machine
that can decipher the human face.

In the Winter of Painted Swastikas

The demonstration is winding down,
the sound system has been dismantled
and stashed in numbered boxes,
students draped in frayed banners
are flirting or commiserating,
there’s still a sense of safety
lingering though the streets
home are icy, dark, and watched,
and if two women hold hands
a helmet on a rooftop will shout
girls coming from the march.