Out of Time, Running
Edward Nudelman
Review by Alice Weiss
I am often afraid of seeing what there is to
see. I think many of us are like this
but not Edward Nudelman. He is hungry to
see and running out of time for it. As the punning title suggests he wants to
look both at time and outside time. What he wants to see is a world populated,
of course, by loved ones, and memories, and nature, but his nature is both
apparent and microscopic, complex and surprisingly visual. In this book he is both poet and scientist.
Indeed, the
poem which seemed to me the richest in this rich set, “Biochemist in a Cold
Room,” takes place in a laboratory late at night. Placing drops of liquid into glass tubes, the
speaker observes, “Each shivering microliter bifurcates: equal parts myth and
discovery.” And that is his journey,
myth and discovery, or his landscape.
Later in this poem he reflects,
It’s a good thing I’m here
in the middle of the night
when the error of judgment
is less pronounced, when artifact
more easily passes for
breakthrough.
Here is the juncture of scientist and poet, and the
contradiction. For the scientist, an
error of judgment may be disastrous, but for the poet it’s a ‘good thing’ for
artifact to “pass for breakthrough,” and a good thing for it to be easy, or is
it? What does it say if late at night
the “error of judgment is less pronounced.”
It has to do with seeing, I think and that is the complex maneuver of
this book. For what is there to see. “Can one discern” he asks in another
poem, “a single dot/in a sea of pixels?”
In “Melody of Complaint,” the opening
poem, the visible landscape is his home where
“[f]aith would warm his hands if he had it. . .and doubt would hog the
room . . but his mood
shrinks
this house into a cell
. . .[of] wants
and wills. A desk riddled with sheets
and letters
and numbers.
Above the
bookcase leaded
with broken
glass, tulips
in a glass
jar begging for light.
Everything
as it were
begging for
light.
There are all these details, these
cells, these atoms, (one of the poems is titled “ Subatomic Rambling”)
observable, visible, but also disappearing, begging, one thinks, for another
kind of light, another way of focusing.
In “Monk Inside,” he both is and
is not “scientist, mud-god, skunk
of wisdom,” and addressing this god of
science, part of him, but not, he demands “. . .[S]peak to me no more in your
native tongue of secrets
unblanketed.
. .
Restless I
am for the lapping moon
and the
first birds of morning. . .
And so who is the monk inside? In “Id Ridden” there is some kind of answer.
He imagines himself fading into the background “while countless unrecognizable
me’s creep forward in stealth. . .sit down with me/ at night, share my
silverware. . .
perhaps
it’s better that way
not knowing
the real you,
. so you can “let it slip out between the lines…”where he
has, in any event, . . .never found anything but blank space. “What’s ironic about grief is that it never
fully goes away and that’s what makes it tolerable.” “The whole idea of bee is
getting softer.” Taking down a roof, he props a ladder partly in a flower bed,
“somewhere between heroism and outright idiocy.” So he is a changeling.
And in his
poem “Lizard Status,” he, the elaborator of visions and implausible
explanations, disgusted with the state of being human, posturing in words like ‘skewered’ and ‘nictitating,’ and ‘
unbridled brine’ slows, finding something wonderful in lizardness announces,
Here am I,
coming to rest on linen. A pear.
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