Nostalgia on a summer breeze

At last, the season for reading outdoors has truly arrived. Oh sure, I used to read in the snow fort I’d built in the backyard, but that was a long time ago, a time I’m not all that nostalgic for. Still, such thoughts are somewhat apt, as the book I read yesterday afternoon, Diane Tucker’s Nostalgia for Moving Parts, opens with memories of childhood.

Whether she’s recalling the feel of bare feet on cool floors or sliding on them “in sock feet” or lying down, staring into the heat vents which she describes perfectly as looking like “little venetian blinds” she’s certainly succeeded in transporting me there. Even in her stories of being a very young girl, we see her developing what she understands being a woman to mean, whether that’s disliking a dress your mother wants you to wear, flirting with a cute boy in grade two, or coming to the realization that there’d come a day when “You threw the dice of yourself and hoped you’d win.”

Her poems and the experiences they recount—including the deaths of both of her parents—have taken me to some of the places I realize I still need to pay more attention to. Even my massage therapist tells me that my pains are from holding back grief. As the poet Edward Hirsch reminds us in 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, “The poet is one who…is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art.”

And that seems to be exactly what Tucker has done with her poems, which deal with everything from the joys of backyard games:

we smashed the badminton birdie

over the fading net arc after arc

until evening ate the small white thing

 to observations about the qualities of evening wine: 

White wine is not white but golden,

bright lantern to light your aging limbs,

slow lover bathing your solitary throat.

 And from those words I read on yesterday’s summery afternoon (“This afternoon could scour the cool / out of anything…”), I have to say that I am grateful that she has given me words I can use to write about her book, a book that helps me understand why she is nostalgic for certain lost things—and how it is that she has come to write about them. For lack of a better way to express this, I offer a stanza from her poem, ‘The woods are full of poets’: 

As cedar boughs grow down and then

grow up (a double wish, a desire for both

at once), blank paper does two things:

it blocks the light and it lets light through. 

It’s a stanza that in itself evokes a small reminder of (and nostalgia for) Leonard Cohen, and his lessons about light.