Nick Courtright's, Punchline
Goldwake Press, 2012, 96 pages
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Dear Reader,
Nick Courtright's Punchline draws up a sucker punch, line-by-line, poem-by-poem, with an extraordinary tenderness. The spirit of these poems dwell in the roots of the earth, press upward in a spiraling transcendence beyond the heavenly realms:
Ancient insect into the muck. To be a fossil
for the future billions,
the end of the tune
lingering in your ear:
Will you wake up? Have you ever? (p.76)
There is a Keatsian quality to Courtright's style that surpasses time. The poems offer a gentle exoskeleton, and richly delectable entrails. Indeed reader, will you wake up? The exquisite incantations are sparse, surprising. Yet they are lyrics that reach the universal: inevitable loss, star-particles illuminant with hope. The book opens with the meditation on the moon, a circle, and ends with a drawing of the sun, a circle. This meditation, this rapture between dark and light, masculine feminine, this circle of life, a primordial constant, is not a simple reminder, not a dictation or philosophy, but a clear and resonant truth. Punchline is itself a rhythm.
The poems offer a thematic reverie on space. Perhaps it is the space where the soul resides in nature, and we are bound by a human, primitive instinct, to draw, if even with a stick in the sand, the conclusion of self-reflection as the one constant being without an ultimatum. We find in these poems, rhythm as a planetary constancy, time moving us past, "the proof now/ is the proof then."
Courtright brilliantly directs the reader’s awareness that we are, in a sense, under a constant spell of doom, yet we simultaneously press toward and against that knowledge, and just as the sun and moon do their dance, so do we... "in the ringtones of college students, the darning / needles of grandmothers // and the lawn mowers and skillets of everyone in between."
His collection, in itself, is like that movement, those darning needles. In Punchline, Courtright provides hope, rendering the world a more beautiful landscape.
Hopelessly hopeful,
Maureen Alsop
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Maureen Alsop is an Associate Poetry Editor for Poemeleon.