Nilsson's 'Abattoir' Proves Dull

“Sensitivity isn’t being wimpy,” Jeff Buckley once declared. “It’s about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom.” While Kathy Nilsson refrains from such gestures of grandiose pomposity, her poems are imbued with a similar ear for the power of the mundane. “The Abattoir” is a chapbook with 23 poems that frequently use the everyday to direct the reader on to more abstract concerns of love, loss, and a decaying spirituality. Written in Cambridge and published out of Georgetown, Kentucky, the poems frequently evoke the spirit of down-home Americana. In “Window-Shopping,” a broken-hearted man stares into the windows of a “haberdashery.” In “Overwintering”, a man looking at “all the lovely things of this world” looks first at apples.

Yet this combination of the everyday and the American is lost in an endless barrage of imagery that typically rings false. If a first rule of paint-by-numbers poetry is distinctive images, Nilsson appears to have taken this rule to heart, and too dramatically at that. Her images are certainly distinctive—from “The Procures,” “a mountain sitting in a fair sky, girls / of gentle birth sheathed in goatskin and tulle.” The latter image is one of several in this collection that allude to our distant, primeval past. Yet these distinctive images are lost by dilution, by the worst kind of overkill. Take this stanza from “Underground Beauty”: “Inside, tiny sparkling / mineral, gypsum flowers, / lettuce and coral, shy trident / bats, fairy shrimp- / eggs which hatch after fifteen years.” Poets have used lists to great effect before. But unlike Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Pied Beauty,” a poem similarly concerned with nature and spirituality, Nilsson merely lists. The words above have no particular rhythmic quality; the enjambments do not aid the poem’s flow. This list style, prevalent throughout the collection, ensures that these images, individually so enigmatic and striking, lose their impact and individuality. The reader would need endless patience, not to mention an excellent dictionary, to parse the intricacies of every single poem. That is not to mention the innumerable times when Nilsson’s extravagant similes and metaphors strain the limits even of poetic license. “They left like young autumn octopuses,” she writes of “The Infant Scholars.” Mere originality is not noteworthy. And “originality” so overtly forced is overbearing and dull.

Even less convincing are the attempts scattered throughout “The Abbatoir” at accompanying the themes and motifs of animals, the elemental and the bona fide American, with a feigned exoticism. This takes the form of meaningless phrases that refer to “Abroad”—typically Europe. Thus we read of “Italian Bees Grazing a Table in August”; never mind that the fact that they are Italian has no discernible import for the poem. Similarly, in “Surgery,” “A dusting of snow / fastens to roofs / on a row of Delft houses.” In the first poem, “Ornament,” Nilsson informs her interlocutor that “Your heart is as large as an anthill in Switzerland”—presumably, the heart in question is non-existent. Elsewhere, the poet takes us to Lapland, treads on Persian rugs, compares the heart to a “timber mansion on the Bosporus” and watches deer in Auvers while musing about Cezanne’s apples—tall traveling orders for such a brief collection.

Yet this preponderance of bizarre images and places is compounded by Nilsson’s decision to emphasize her most unusual and least meaningful through the use of italics. Italicization in poetry is a hokey maneuver at the best of times; unlike in prose, it is susceptible to use, or rather misuse, as a means not to emphasize meaning but rather to draw attention to a phrase that the poet considers exceptional. Nilsson has a bad case of this affliction. In the closing poem, “Cleaning the Icons,” she writes of “a naughtment of the self;” both the italicization of “a” as well as the use of “naughtment” emphasize only mind-numbing pretension. Yet on the next page itself she writes of “souls of cork,” an utterly needless use of the same conceit.

It is shame that all of this obscures the collection’s strengths. Chief among these is its unity of vision, its continual concern with the similarity of human life to animal life, of our continuity with our animal ancestors. Not only is this a unique and compelling theme for a book of poetry, it also provides a framework in which the poet’s less outlandish imagery can at times be evocative and startling. The collection’s most moving lines, from “Sympathetic Magic,” are an illustration of this: “We fell out below human range, / with a kitten’s commitment to sleep, / in a paired lightening, peaceful, like the spotted / leopard lying with its unfinished gazelle.”

There are several nice touches here, such as the clever pun of “lightening.” Most of all, however, its exquisite juxtaposition of those timeless poetic partners, the ugly and the beautiful, makes it surprising and memorable. Much as with the word “abattoir,” it is an ugly thing beautifully described. And Nilsson is at her best when is she is restrained, unassuming, even quiet. If only she was these things more often.