Nightingale - Softcover

Rekdal, Paisley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1556595670 ISBN 13: 9781556595677

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2019

Synopsis

Nightingale is a book about change. This collection radically rewrites and contemporizes many of the myths central to Ovid’s epic, The Metamorphoses, Rekdal’s characters changed not by divine intervention but by both ordinary and extraordinary human events. In Nightingale, a mother undergoes cancer treatments at the same time her daughter transitions into a son; a woman comes to painful terms with her new sexual life after becoming quadriplegic; a photographer wonders whether her art is to blame for her son’s sudden illness; and a widow falls in love with her dead husband’s dog. At the same time, however, the book includes more intimate lyrics that explore personal transformation, culminating in a series of connected poems that trace the continuing effects of sexual violence and rape on survivors. Nightingale updates many of Ovid’s subjects while remaining true to the Roman epic’s tropes of violence, dismemberment, silence, and fragmentation. Is change a physical or a spiritual act? Is transformation punishment or reward, reversible or permanent? Does metamorphosis literalize our essential traits, or change us into something utterly new? Nightingale investigates these themes, while considering the roles that pain, violence, art, and voicelessness all play in the changeable selves we present to the world.

About this title

About the Author

Paisley Rekdal is the author of six collections of poetry, addition to three nonfiction and

hybrid-genre books. Her honors include being named Utah’s Poet Laureate.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PHILOMELA

Because her grandmother loved

the arts, her father said, she’d willed

the money to a distant cousin

working as a sculptor. A decision

made the month before she’d died

from cancer, which the young woman

can not now believe was due

only to a brain tumor, having endured

the last, deliberate ways her grandmother asked

why she’d never married.

The cousin, who inherited the money,

showed her sculptures in a converted barn:

the only space large enough to contain

the seething shapes that seemed to flame

up from their pedestals

in precarious arcs. An audacity

of engineering the young woman

tried not to see as a reproach

when, curious, she visited:

how the sculptures made her feel

too earth-bound, solid. At the gallery,

she stared a long while at what she thought

was a tree blasted by lightning,

but the more she looked, the more clearly

shapes emerged. There

were a man’s hands gripping a slender figure

by the waist, the thin body writhing,

frozen in his arms. It was

a girl, she saw, with shredded

bark for breasts and dark charred wood

for legs, as if the limbs had been snatched

from a fire while burning.

Her twig hands raked

her captor’s face. The young woman

could read no emotion on it,

however: the plank face

had been scraped clean; all the fear

and anger burned instead inside

their twisting bodies: she could see

the two there stuck at a point

of perfect hatred for each other: she

for his attack, he for her resistance,

perhaps the beauty he could not

stand in her, as her last date in college

had hissed, “You think

you’re so fucking pretty,” spitting it

into her face so that she’d had to turn

her cheek to wipe it, which was when

he’d grabbed her arm then, pinning her―
Was this why her cousin had been chosen, to make

what she’d had no words for?

Persephone, the piece she stood

amazed before had been titled: the last,

unconscious gift of her grandmother.

“For your wedding,” she’d said

her last week, pointing

to her own open palm in which

nothing rested. Perhaps

her grandmother had imagined

a gold ring there. Perhaps a string

of thick pink pearls. The young woman

drove home from the gallery, took a shower,

and did not tell anyone that day

what it was she’d seen. A month later,

in the mail, a package came

from her father: her grandmother’s Singer

sewing machine, its antique brass wheel

scrubbed of gold, the wooden handle

glossy with vines of mother-of-pearl.

It was lovely, and for a moment

she considered sewing a quilt with it,

onto which she might embroider

shooting stars in reds and saffron, the figure

of a child, perhaps, or of a man

by a house’s courtyard, his hat

in his hands, his broad body

naked, harmless.
How much thread would that take

to make? she wondered. And considered it

a long while before packing up

the machine again, sliding it back

into its wood crate and high up onto a shelf

of her basement closet. The place

she kept her college books and papers,

where she told herself it could wait.
NIGHTINGALE: A GLOSS

Nay, then I'll stop your mouth.

Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

Language is the first site of loss and our first defense against it. Which is why after Philomela’s brother-in-law, Tereus, rapes her, he cuts out her tongue and tosses it, the bloody stump writhing at her feet.

*

In my poem “Philomela,” I leave out this mutilation. Strike out, too, Philomela’s sister, Procne, who learns of her sister’s rape from the tapestry Philomela weaves. Cut the death of Itylus, Procne’s son, whom the sisters dismember and boil for punishment; Philomela, mute but grinning, tossing the boy’s head at his father. No metamorphosis of Philomela and Procne into nightingale and swallow, Tereus shrunk into the hoopoe that pursues them. Such details would be unimaginable, I think. Not because a contemporary reader can’t imagine them, but because the details are now too grotesque for her to want to.

*

Ovid makes the trio’s transformation occur at the instant syntax shifts from the conditional to the imperfect. “The girls went flying.../ as if they were on wings. They were on wings!” he writes. The difference between simile and metaphor. The second the mouth conceives it, the imagination turns it into the real.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 669-670

*

I’m writing “Philomela” at an artists’ colony where I go for daily runs. Sometimes a man in a car will pace me; sometimes a man on his bike will circle back to get another look. Sometimes the men who pass me say nothing.

Around this residency are woods in which, the staff informs us, we can walk. It is beautiful here, and there are olive groves. I do not ever walk by myself in the woods.

*

It’s 1992 and I’m hiking near Loch Ness. It’s just after breakfast: I’ve spent the morning alone in a stand of gold aspen that circles the lake. When the three men find me, the smell of beer and whiskey thick on their clothes, bait boxes and fishing rods in hand, I have just sat down to rest with my book. The men are red-eyed, gruff. The first two nod as they pass me: it is the third who walks back. He has lank, gingery hair, and black spots in his teeth.

Hello, he says when he reaches me.

*

Nightingale: OE, nihtegala, niht + galan, small, reddish-brown migratory bird celebrated for its sweet night song during the breeding season. In Dutch, a frog.

Virgil, The Georgics, Book IV:

[A]s mourning beneath the poplar shade the nightingale

laments her lost brood... she sobs

nightlong, and on a branch perched her doleful song

renews―“

Shelley, The Defense of Poesy: “A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician.”

Edition details

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1556595670
• ISBN 13: 9781556595677
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 96