Review of Venus in Retirement by David Michael Nixon, Kanona, NY: Foothills Publishing, 2007, $7 (www.foothillspublishing.com)
David Michael Nixon has been one of the mainstays of the Rochester, NY poetry scene for as long as I can remember. Our friendship goes back more than thirty years to when we met at Jimmy LaVilla-Havelin’s Poetry Central reading series in the big lounge of the downtown Universalist Church. Perhaps we had just heard a trenchcoat-clad Marvin Bell read his work.
Venus in Retirement is Nixon’s fourth chapbook of poems, and he has published one full-length collection, making him a candidate for a “new and selected poems” that would bring these and new poems together. He is a serious poet, and his work merits the closer, longer, deeper look that such a publication would bring.
Venus in Retirement is a selection of twenty seriously humorous poems, meaning that the poems harbor an intent beyond a mere laugh. They are thoughtful, clever and dextrous. They play with language and concepts, and many achieve a laughing “aha.” Nixon is not afraid of taking a poem to the “dark side,” as he does in
See Puff Drive the Dragon
Look Jane. See Spot bleed.
See Spot eaten
by the dragon.
See Puff drive the dragon
off, as Dick pukes
in the green bushes.
Look Jane. See the dragon
run. See Puff slash the
dragon open. Look Dick.
See Spot stagger
out of the dragon’s torn
guts. See Puff lick Spot clean.
Look! Look! See the dead dragon.
Feel us all back together,
happy, alive.
See what Puff has done.
Peter, Paul and Mary channeled through the Brothers Grimm sponsored by Our Daily Reader.
Many poems seem like fragments of another reality, interesting bits and pieces, but the shards are all we have, and from them we can try to re-construct the poet’s universe. Nixon often suggests the trouble we have in getting the pieces to fit back together, and these poems remind me of the darkly incongruous poems of Russell Edson. Two poems begin with
The Trouble
When he held himself,
it was an embrace
like no other, and
it was good, but there
was something missing,
so he had to go
out and find other
arms, and that’s when all
the trouble started.
The poem’s a single sentence but broken into lines that propel meaning unlike a simple linear prose line and compel the reader to slow, start again, double/back within the poem. After reading a short poem, Robert Bly asks, “Would you like to hear that again?” but he really meant, “Stand up and use your ears like a man.” (Ives)
David Michael Nixon is an elder statesman from the stateless Realm of Poetry. He works hard and long for Poetry, listening and speaking. We should listen to him carefully.
—Stephen Lewandowski