For the Fire From the Straw by Heidi Lynn Nilsson: Review by Cameron MacKenzie
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The themes of Heidi Lynn Nilsson's For the Fire from the Straw are large: violence; lust; insanity; guilt; love. To ratchet up the stakes even further, these themes are explored through a relentless testing of the word God, resulting in a collection that is a remarkable blend of faith, intellect, and physicality.
So many of the poems here leverage what the speaker of the poem senses to be true against what she is able to say, all the while remaining ceaselessly attentive to the excess of that procedure, which is given the name God. In that sense, God becomes an ever-present and ultimately unknowable discrepancy between the speaker and the world, an entity upon which the poems constantly throw their ideals, and upon which they ultimately break. The sustained pitch of the work is unnerving, and the results are spectacular.
I realize I’m making the book sound very serious, and it is, but a great deal of its draw lies in its playfulness, in its willingness to follow delicious diversions in both theme and language. In “On the Burning of My Wrist By Water,” Nilsson writes,
[...] Tell me
the limits
to liquid’s heat.
Depict those molecules—
linked, listing
over afterlights
like boats roped together—
loose, like that
and moving
Read that out loud and try not to smile. In “An Epistle to Elsa the Ice Queen from the Buddha,” the Enlightened One admits to the Disney princess,
I can make no distinctions between your facts and fictions.
I imagine
pursuing the truth
to be like hunting moose
in an Estonian forest.
A diversion, however, is always only that—a momentary turn away from the issue at hand. And so, in “An Epistle for Martin Luther from Jimmy Buffett,” a poem that seems ready made for the easy laugh, a poem that begs comparison between biblical pillars of salt and Jimmy’s forever lost shaker—a poem that ends with “it’s my own / damned fault”—we are also told that
A fear of God
I suffer as one might suffer a song
playing nowhere nearby
but repeating
incessantly in the head—
feeds my faith
or madness.
The idea that faith is madness, or is a particular manifestation of madness, repeats throughout Nilsson's collection. “An Ecclesiastical Education Falls Away from the Basin” tells us that faith
resembles nothing
pure or clean.
It’s legless and patchy and lacks
eyelids—like lust—
and lays its own eggs everywhere
If "faith" becomes the word for the sick and ungovernable within, what are we to make of the object of that obsession? In “Learns the End with What We Did Begin,” God comes to embody the act of shepherding that mindless and ungovernable energy toward its object and release: here, the body of another.
Upon me gently, wrath divine,
come down, I often pray
[…]
I’ve asked God to give
yours to me
But Nilsson's poetry is not content to rest on such a neat conclusion. The book is nothing if not intelligent—ceaselessly, unquietly intelligent—restlessly interrogating the split of God and self and other. The poem “How What Is to Be Said Should Be Taken” asks:
Before the flesh,
can’t the word stretch
beyond expression?
Can one word bear more
than one intention?
If the spirit
of the word
shivers, will a tongue
somewhere
flare
like a cloak?
That poem concludes with:
We're no word but suspended
between flesh
and soul. Smooth
those nails that hold us here
and loose the hole.
Here, ‘we’—pressured to reveal both signifier and signified at once—is neither physical nor spiritual but is held between the two realms by…fingernails? Or is it held by nails, as though on a cross of the spiritual and physical? And what about the action of those nails that would "hold" even as they loosen? The poem would wound even as it sets free, catch as it releases, kill as it brings to life—so much like the word itself, but not, perhaps, the flesh. Nearly every piece in the book invites and rewards this level of attention.
If I could point to a single poem that may be indicative of the collection in total, “The Maths of Gifts That Are Not Wages” comes closest. The speaker of that poem begins by praying to “Father," before beginning a meditation on the difference between the undone and the done, the unaccomplished and the life that has already been lived. The speaker lingers for a moment on lost pleasure, on that which “in the end / […] I denied myself.”
From this admission the poem turns toward a figure that walks beside the speaker as they move down Assateague beach, as the moon was
slopping her mouth-water
across the face of the sea, and that's not the way
to love, but the sea kept nodding patiently.
The "Father" from the opening lines has now become embodied in the man who walks beside the speaker, and as she looks upon that man’s face, she confesses that:
a love leans forth in me
in which no behavior is saved.
Then I don’t know my own head
from the tethered boat.
I don’t know the straight road of sand
from your throat.
Coming near the end of the book, after all the splitting and doubling and tarrying with negatives, this poem in particular rests on the image of the body of the other, which is the body of a man, a physical body that is also a holy body, and the holiness of that man’s body is a paradox not undone or undercut, but is instead pinned and held.
Heidi Lynn Nilsson is a poet of power and vision. If I am to say that such a vision is encompassed, or is articulated by, a faith that I do not share, that only makes all the more evident the relentlessness with which the text investigates the modes and stakes of that articulation. It names itself, and in that naming seeks to know itself, to know why it has given itself the name that it has. The ambition, the intention, and the honesty by which the book accomplishes this is unsettling in the best possible way.
Cameron MacKenzie's work has appeared in Able Muse, The Rumpus, SubStance and The Michigan Quarterly Review, among other journals. His essays have been collected in The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective and Edward P. Jones: New Essays. His novel The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career, a novel about the early life of Pancho Villa, is now available. He teaches English at Ferrum College.
