D. Nurkse is an American poet who is relatively unknown to British readers. With the publication by the enterprising CB Editions of Voices Over Water , his second collection, that looks set to change. Charting the lives of a married couple and their emigration from Estonia to Canada in the early twentieth century, it is an oddly gripping read; each page furthering a narrative in which the minutiae of a traditional rural life are caught against a backdrop of violence, war and famine. This interplay of the personal and the historical is particularly apparent in eye-catching similes. In “Slow Summer”, for example, which views prolonged conflict through the haze of a humid August, Estonia’s borders are seen to “tangle like our bodies / in love”, while in “Plains”, vast silence is “like a strong arm” encircling the narrator’s wife. Yet these rhetorical flourishes are sparingly deployed. Rather, it is plain diction, deft narrative pacing, and an insistent yet unobtrusive mus...
poet | critic | writer