Windshear by Christopher Nelson
Windshear, by Christopher Nelson
Jacar Press, 2024
reviewed by Bethany Reid
winner of the Jacar Press Chapbook Prize, 2024
When I first encountered Christopher Nelson’s Windshear, I was preparing to teach a class on the poetry of May Swenson (1913-1989). I have not done a deep dive into Nelson’s poetic influences, but I find the resonances irresistible. In this slim chapbook of 18 poems, form is everywhere part of the effect; five poems are obviously sculpted on the page—echoing and outdoing Swenson in their experimental artistry, or what she calls “iconographies.” Nelson’s iconographs go further, not concerning themselves with anything so mundane as legibility, but seeming to be about the embrace, the coupling of meaning with nonsense, of form with nonconformity. As Swenson once argued to Elizabeth Bishop, unconventional choices in poem-making can slow a reader down and draw them deeper. So with these poems.
Consider Nelson’s poem “Youth,” where lines look as though they have been cut out and collaged—willy-nilly—on the page. Consider the final poem, “Windshear Coda,” where the lines are smudged as if being wiped away. Did I understand what was going on in these poems? Not always. Did I enjoy trying? Definitely.
Nelson, like Swenson, is obsessed with bodies. Human bodies—questioning where next to have sex, or, in “Experience,” considering, “how I’m opened to juice and red pith.” Non-human bodies, too: barn cat, fox, a bee in a flower, bloated corpse of a deer on a highway. As I read (and reread and puzzled over) Windshear, I began to understand how the rumpled, jagged forms are not just for the devil of it. Throughout the book we encounter not only imperiled lines but a prominent theme of imperiled bodies, something we might all relate to in these politically charged days. Lines are fractured, awkwardly juxtaposed, smudged, reverse-imaged. And so are the lives depicted. I can’t replicate the reverse images of the right column of Nelson’s “Mirror,” but these are the opening lines as they appear in the left-hand column [full poem in link below]:
many
believe madness to be
a doubling, or more, of
identity, a self in shards
but it’s an entering ::
choose: fog, maze
brightness, penumbra
shit storm
Many poets play with jumps in time, but in Nelson’s poems, time is so off its leash that this, too, struck me as unconventional. (Though I should admit that I love poems that time-travel.) In “Nascency,” it’s both now and thirty-eight years ago; “the brown trout are // 300 million years older than / what we call God”; we see the poet as a child trying “the rope swing / at Kohler’s gate”—and we are back there, too, swinging, “divine in our arc and fall.”
If I can make one more attempt to revivify and make Swenson relevant: “Bleeding,” one of her best-known “sculpted” poems [see link below], is not remembered for its content so much as its form (though the content is pretty great, too), where knife and wound address one another across a caesura that runs down the poem like a slash. Nelson’s most iconographic poem, “Dawn,” required me to enlarge and print out the page in order to follow the lines.
And, after going to that trouble, was I able to follow it? In “Dawn,” lines swirl in a circle—perhaps like a rising sun, but more resembling a window pierced and partially fractured by a bullet—the words and sense weave not quite together and in ways that you can’t follow no matter how hard you try. I finally had to admit that following wasn’t the point.
Contest judge Leila Chatti described Nelson’s poems as “richly imagistic and formally inventive,” adding that they “see straight through to the actual, at once unflinching and tender.” Seeing definitely matters here. Ideally, Windshear is not a book to be read as a PDF, but one you need to hold in your hands.
Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018). Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .
Interview with Christopher Nelson at Tupelo Press Quarterly
“Mirror” by Christopher Nelson at miCro
YouTube interview with Christopher Nelson on the poetry of Iran and its diaspora
May Swenson’s poem “Bleeding” at Academy of American Poets
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