Review: A way back into poetry

Gary Ciocco / InReview

Renée Nicholson, former director of the Humanities Center at West Virginia University, has published poetry, “Roundabout Directions to Lincoln Center,” a memoir-in-essays, “Fierce and Delicate,” and co-edited “Bodies of Truth,” an anthology dedicated to narrative medicine. She holds a Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, and currently works as a speaker and consultant in that field.

Nicholson’s new poetry collection, “Postscripts,” is a kind of travelog, one which captures not just the vicissitudes, vagaries and vital signs of various places and cultures, but remains rooted in the wilds of West Virginia and also grounded in grief, at the loss of her brother to cancer in 2019.

The first poem, “Postcards to West Virginia,” sets the stage for wanderlust and a rooted return. “I left wild, wonderful.” the poet begins; then, in the middle wonders, “Did I ever leave?” And she ends with “…we passed back into you, a fickle / lover who returns after the affairs.”

If this foreshadows the framework of travel, the very next poem, “Zen Cancer Saloon,” raises the specter of death and grief. But we read that “Complaints are few at the…Saloon, / ….Everyday’s a gift / even on the drip.” At this saloon, “the patrons never waiver” and “trade in happiness.” The poet bears witness to the remarkable gratefulness shown by those coming close to their “last call” at this saloon.

The center of the book has eight more “Postcard” poems. One is sent from “the edge of the Amazon,” another is “composed at Panadería.” In “Postcard from the Met,” the poet has a fleeting encounter with “a man with curls like a cherub”; the man is “Wide eying,” which appears to apply both to “me seated on the bench,” and to the painting they both peruse, where “an artist embraces / woman, his creation,” but in such a way that the speaker is led to wonder, “Does / he think he might squeeze life into her?”

The man pivots “within an eight count,” and “when I lift my gaze, he’s gone.” This quick, cryptic moment with a stranger is set against the indwelling of the “Postcard Written at My Brother’s House.”

The poems evoke the recent present; her brother “has cancer” with “his daughter tucked to his side.” Boys also “play on the floor in the half- / light of pulled blinds … What is a house for?” The question is part rhetorical; she describes her brother — “lean from chemo, / drinks Arnold Palmers … hair, dark-flecked with silver … Mom’s nose, / the shape of Dad’s eyes.”

The center stanza ends with “We” and the final stanza drops the word “house,” in favor of the “high-pitched laughter of kids,” which makes these walls and windows “more like a home.” The art museum inspires and individuates; the home holds our hopes for rest, and restorative family memories.

She writes about her brother, to whom the book is dedicated, in “Dear Nate: Concourse.” As she sees Miffy the bunny glow “in the red light of Amsterdam’s airport,” the poet muses about the scene’s lack of carnality. And then extols the power of the sky, “that hung a moon & stars over all of us, even / Miffy, even me, lone wanderer, searching / this world for what I lost back home.”

The final and title poem, “Postscript (for you),” gives narrative closure. Among the “smell of eucalyptus” and the taste of “deep chocolate / on my tongue, my thoughts / drift to you.” The result is “Tears, gushing over / the undulating waterfall, all the weeping / I have yet to cascading…. / Me, a pilgrim upon the cobblestone path. / I do not stumble.”

In “Postcripts,” Renée Nicholson finds a way out from grief, and a way back into poetry. Her travels and her returns home, as she writes in “Because Rest Was Once a Creative Act,” have taught her to “Nestle down / into that sweet spot / of the night,” and to grasp how “the sleep sound of your lover / keeps you tethered.” Amid her grief, she finds how the tethered and untethered can combine to form an artistic sweet spot.

Gary Ciocco is a traveling philosophy professor and poet who lives south of Pittsburgh.