learning to miss
Reviewed by Joseph Stanton, University of Hawaii at Manoa
2 october 2018 archive
Paul Nelson has produced many poems on hunting and fishing in his long career. Although those sports, as sports, are not the prime concerns of most of the excellent poems in Learning to Miss, his ninth collection of verse, there is plenty in this book about patiently seeking to see and reflect upon the vast world of creatures, the wide society of people; the poet is hunting, indeed, for the particularities of his present and remembered worlds and the possible meanings of some of those things.
There are, however, some striking poems that do involve sport.
In "Rainbow Trout" we find the elder fisherman, "huge in his waders," picking in his fly-box "a nymph, midge, larval emerger, mayfly trying to decide, maybe a puffy bee or chicken feather grasshopper, choosing by weather, hunch," while making eye contact with a trout—"sleek, speckled, poised muscle, holding in shallows." In the midst of this classic encounter between man and fish, a "local boy" arrives, who has never fished before—a boy the elder fisherman realizes once "was me."
Then there is "Delivery" in which a weary deer hunter, who has bagged no game, manages to get picked up, his rifle in his hands, by a school bus full of weary kids. The poem is filled with poignant details, as always in a Nelson poem, but, in the end, all that happens is that the bus makes its stops and everyone is delivered.
Often in these poems there is the sense of an older poet contemplating his elderly (yet still very active) life, while also looking back on his own youth and contemplating young people he happens to encounter. Among the evocative poems on hunting creatures is "Crow," a poem about a young boy carefully aiming his rifle and killing a crow, and then, holding the dead animal in his hands, inspecting "the brown-eyed bundle he suddenly did not intend to kill." In "Turtle," a young man gets a large snapping turtle to bite on a broom handle while he reaches around to grab the fierce creature's rear legs "to draw her skidding and hideous up to light." This vivid poem is about being young, hungry and not wanting to "let go."
I strongly recommend Learning to Miss to anyone with an interest in great poetry.
Learning to Miss, by Paul Nelson. Guernica World Editions 2018.
Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Stanton