Some Ether: Poems

by Nick Flynn

Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award
Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry

Some Ether is one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary, American

104 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet.



Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Ken]

On the Poetry Foundation site, there's a quote about Nick Flynn that's relevant to this, his first collection of poems:

Having written about his family in both poetry and prose, Flynn has said, “The way I write I don’t see much distinction between the two, although prose seems more suited to daylight, and poetry to night. I try to cook both down to something essential—by the end hopefully some balance between mystery and clarity remains.”

I'd say this collection hits that sweet spot between mystery and clarity just right. Lots of poems about his childhood, growing up with an overwhelmed mother and an alcoholic father in a hardscrabble, blue-collar town in Massachusetts.

Here's a lighter one from the book...


Cartoon Physics, part 1

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down—earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.


And here's a heavier one (sans indents due to HTML's inability to manage it):


My Mother Contemplating Her Gun

One boyfriend said to keep the bullets

locked in a different room.
Another urged
clean it
or it could explode. Larry

thought I should keep it loaded
under my bed,
you never know.

I bought it
when I didn’t feel safe. The barrel
is oily,

reflective, the steel

pure, pulled from a hole
in West Virginia. It

could have been cast into anything, nails
along the carpenter’s lip, the ladder

to balance the train. Look at this, one
bullet,

how almost nothing it is—

saltpeter sulphur lead Hell

burns sulphur, a smell like this.
safety & hammer, barrel & grip

I don’t know what I believe.

I remember the woods behind my father’s house
horses beside the quarry

stolen cars lost in the deepest wells,
the water below
an ink waiting to fill me.

Outside a towel hangs from a cold line
a sheet of iron in the sky

roses painted on it, blue roses.

Tomorrow it will still be there.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some Ether was the twelfth book in my October poetry project, a reread of a collection by one of my favorite poets. Perhaps because I've read so much more of Nick Flynn's work since I first read this, it resonated even more strongly with me this time around. Also, I purchased this book at a Nick Flynn reading I attended while on a work trip in Seattle, and that is one of my favorite memories of the last several years and makes me love the book even more. Four stars on first read, five stars for the second time.

[Nathaniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I went out on a limb and bought a book of poetry based on the goodreads star rating of someone I don't know who seemed to have decent taste in obscure literature. Plus, I am trying to make an effort to read living poets who write in English.

Of Flynn's first four poems, three were about suicide, two referenced guns, two referenced painkillers (by brand name) and one mentions cutting himself. It only got worse from there. Blah blah "my father is . . . a bottle wrapped in a paperbag" blah blah "shelters,/ shitsville" blah blah "I eat all her percodans, to know/ how far they can take me, because/ they are there." blah blah "she could whisper the wordburn/& I'd turn to ash.."

Seriously? This book strengthened all of the dismissive, prejudiced opinions that I hold about modern American poetry and how completely pathetic and unworth reading it is. This guy has been published all over the place and awarded several prizes. If I had just researched him enough to realize that he actually published a "memoir" called "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City" I would have suspected that he has no business writing poetry.

There is rarely a reason for his language not to be presented in paragraph form as bad prose. It is rarer for him to use italics effectively--though he seems to think they have a place in most of his poems. The language itself is thin. He is too busy seeking to legitimize his composed proximity to suffering and ruin by cheap association with narcotics, suicide, violence and alienation to actually attend to the sort of details and feelings that make poetry real. His love poems show this shortcoming particularly ("my tongue opened you &/ soft birds let loose their grip on the earth" "like whiskey his kiss like whiskey/ tear away at the skin"--he can't even write a good poem about a girl eating a peach.).

I only read the whole book because I had purchased it new, because it was short and because I wanted to have a solid foundation from which to offer criticism. However, on a note that will hardly balance this review, his first two epigrams were very well chosen and I enjoyed "Emptying Town" enough to make two friends read it (for the chuckle value of the closer--not for the unimportant first stanza or the melodramatic second) and "The cellar machine whirring through the night" seems to be about as good as he can write.

Avoid.

[graham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review is incomplete because I need to read Some Ether again. This is not only the first book of poetry, but the first book period that I've ever wanted to re-read as soon as I finished it. Okay: want is slightly misleading. I feel I need to read it again, just to fully understand and appreciate the whole thing.

But, as far as any sort of guiding recommendation, here's what I can offer: not for the faint of heart. Sorry, that's all I've got. More later.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Erin for recommending this book to me. Startling imagery. Unflinching vision.

[K.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book gets better with second and third readings, and it succeeds because he's restrained as he's writing about these two people who have failed him as parents. he never has to bemoan the fact that they're bad parents, only has to show the way their behavior has shaped his emotional experience and there you have it.

poems in the first section cluster around living with his depressed and erratic mother before her suicide, and the following section shows him constructing a life in her absence. he uses the same formula for the poems about the father, though he has less to work with. the poems here are less powerful than those about the mother, but the overall effect of the poems as they inform and speak to each other is compelling.

as testimonies of survival, these are stellar, but more than that, they are articulate, beautiful, seemingly unassuming poems that knock you back with their emotional charge.

[Tai Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some Ether by Nick Flynn. Graywolf Press. May 2000.

“Some Ether” written by Nick Flynn is a collection of dark poems that seeks to revisit the tragedies of his childhood. The speaker in each poem seeks deliverance as he is desperate to find love, understanding and closure to surpass the demons that haunt him. It is evident that Flynn has grown from these life-changing experiences, never allowing to be submerged into self destruction.

He uses words as a force to work though dealing with his mother’s drug abuse and suicide, her promiscuity and his homeless father. The veracity of his troubled family haunts him at a very young age. In the poem “Cartoon Physics, Part 1” Flynn clearly addresses how a child should not be subjected to adult realities so that it robs him of his innocence. “.Ten-year-olds // should stick with burning houses, car wrecks, / ships going down -- earthbound, tangible // disasters, arenas // where they can be heroes. You can run / back into a burning house, sinking ships // have lifeboats, the trucks will come / with their ladders, if you jump // you will be saved”(24). Flynn illustrates such a sad reality of the disappointment a child feels when he is shorted by his parents and how deeply a child relies on his mother for love, guidance and acceptance.

The speaker in these poems do not illustrate a whiny, woe is me type of mentality. I think this is Flynn’s way of coping with his troubled childhood and give him the voice that was silenced or unheard. This is his testament of survival. I am sure readers are sympathetic after reading this collections but I think what Flynn wants readers to take from his written experiences is the strength and humanity he sought through reuniting himself to his past. “He wants to save me // but we disagree from what. My version of hell // is someone ripping open his // shirt & saying, // look what I did for you” (20). In these lines from “Emptying Town” he is suggesting that although everyone will not agree on how to view other people’s experiences, no one wants help by being pitied.

Flynn addresses his childhood with such dramatic language and imagery, with crude depictions of his mother and the male company she kept. What allows for him to freely express these ideas is the use of free verse and figurative language. These read like short narrative of an on going tale that chronicles his existence. Each piece has a dark tone. Themes of loss and longing run continuous through these pieces. Nick Flynn’s "Some Ether" is a staggering viewpoint of one man’s experiences, told through the power of voice.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading.

This book owes a lot to confessional poetry, to Sexton, to Plath, to Dickinson. the poet doesn't transcend, he self-destructs. he is concerned with his parents, sex, art and drugs. if you are in a place where you're like 'fuck sad whiteboy poets and their lives i don't care', this book won't speak to you. Now that you know what you're getting --

Nick is a deft poet, has his clearly defined subject matter (mom dies of suicide on the first page, self destructing son, disappointing father). He splits the book sections up in readable and understandable ways, but still propels the reader through this entire body of work. the pull-quotes on each section speak to and deepen the poems that follow them. My favorite was from sec. 3, Devil Theory:

Ruin is formal — Devil's work
Consecutive and slow —

from Emily Dickinson. It's from poem 1010, but Flynn leaves it uncited.

The sex is well-written. Especially "Fugue", "Splenectomy" (surprising, delightful), and, I think, "Soft Radio" (don't have the book in front of me). I love the way he writers gender, his detached ambivalence to maleness, his straightness mostly about his intense desire for women. I like his attention to the tragic, and how he lets women be tragic. His mother is the most tragic character in the book, far more so than the Nick-on-the-page, and the way her death shapes the speaker's sexuality and tenderness is beautiful.

poets, i recommend this as a craft read for anyone struggling with pacing, writing engaging but not explicit sex, narrators staying in the body, and clear and distinct characterization.

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many do not know that Nick Flynn is a poet, in fact, I had no idea when I met him a couple years ago. Some reviewers on Goodreads have criticized Flynn for his candidness about his life, and his parents (which most know a little about from his other work, or from the film "Being Flynn". One reviewer even ranted that it was a "poor me" collection of poems about suicide, schizophrenia, and self harm. I think these reviewers know little about poetry, and quite possible missed the point of this collection. Sure, this collection stands on the line of tragedy, and sure the content is no holiday in Paris. This is a traumatic collection, certainly no where near the melodramatic (as some reviewers would have you believe), no where near heavy handed. If anything, I fell in love the with tenderness of the language, and the gentle handling of harsh content. In the hands of a novice, this collection could have run into common cliche', but Flynn is anything but novice. I enjoyed this collection, at least as much as one chooses to fall into the trauma of another, accepting the pain that comes with reading such material. Flynn's attention to the details that matter, and word choice that avoided the easy route, and called readers to look at the subjects in each section through different lenses. This is a collection that leaves me uneasy, but it is the power of creating such a space that has left me still ruminating.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some Ether is Nick Flynn's debut collection of poetry, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award (1999), and an astounding work of beauty wrapped in a ball of pain.

Flynn takes us on a journey through his childhood- divorce parents, a troubled mother, strange men, and his mother's suicide. Pretty dark stuff, but written with a sense of enlightenment. The way he recalls these memories is so poetic and honest, it's what I hope to achieve every time I write but I'm nowhere near as graceful.

After I read the first poem in this collection, Bag of Mice, I was hooked. Check it out...

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered Nick Flynn's work at a reading I attended for extra credit. I left speechless - I wanted to tell everyone how exquisite, thoughtful, deliberate, melodical Flynn's words were, but I felt there was no way I could do his poems justice. Instead, I bought two copies of "Some Ether" - one for me to keep, the other to thrust into the hands of anyone and everyone who would accept.

[christopher leibow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nick Flynn’s book really moved me. Growing up in a seriously dysfunction home with a depressive mother, I was able to relate to the subject matter of this collections of poems. Flynn is excellent at expressing the horrors of his mother’s suicide very dramatically without ever being maudlin or melodramatic

[De walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

pain and the power of beautiful writing is what i learned from this book. the author writes about his beautiful doomed mother in a way that invokes not pity but love and longing. the unusual poetic narrative shows us an almost hard to look at picture of what a mother can mean to a little boy and the man he becomes.. read this book even if you don`t usually read poetry.

[Judah · Rating 5 out of 5]

god it’s so crazy to think how much the poems in this collection really changed the trajectory of my life. we have notable mentions such as elsewhere, mon amor; cartoon physics, part 1; my mother contemplating her gun… thank you again to poetry out loud for introducing me to nick flynn. literally all game changers

there’s something so delicious about flynn’s writing, and pairing his poetry with the context of his memoirs. he’s got such consistent imagery throughout— so much so that his writing takes on its own symbolic language, its own shorthand’s. it’s interesting to pick out the roots emerging as early as this

anywho. nick flynn you will always be famous

[Brian]

I really dig Flynn's style of poetry. This combination of imagery and more straight "confessional" autobio stuff is really breathtaking.

[zhixin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some Ether is a search for meaning, a patchwork of fragmented memories, clues from a vast past taped together, red thread winding through clusters linked by a desperate mind. Flynn is haunted by the self-destructiveness of people around him: primarily his parents, but also a drug-addict childhood friend, society's dispossessed.

The poems are primarily driven by images, each one following after the previous like a slow-motion reel or slideshow. There are some beautiful images in this collection: "the television//pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom", "the goldfish/circled, always surprised by/ the bag, as if expecting the water/ to simply go on & on." There's a sense that Flynn is trying to reach for the surreal, as in the poem Curse: "You will sleep beneath a payphone, dream of a room, a field.// Let the field burn clean, let your children beat the flames/ with brooms." A dream-like quality pervades his poetry, as if the scale of his incomprehension can only look towards the unconscious for its logic to follow. One of my favourite poems from his collection, You moved me through each room (after hypnotherapy), ends with this line: "The whole time I know/I can lift my hands, open my eyes & walk/ back into today, but I never try." It is the opposite of lucid dreaming: it is deliberately suspending reality, replaying and reconstructing flashbacks, combing rooms for unnoticed items, as if finding the right one will right the present.

At times, however, Flynn falls back onto the overt; for instance, the ending of Flood: "I filled sandbags, bought/ another pump, read a manual on lifesaving -- the trick:// hang lifelessly & breathe only air." The choice of "lifelessly" in opposition to "lifesaving" feels rather insipid, hammering in some point about the deadening quality of staying alive -- a disservice of an ending after the brilliant lines of "The water... waits in my/ kitchen, fattening phonebooks, bleeding/ family photographs" (lovely detail with the phone book; the slowness of the rising water conveyed) and "Ten strangers/ floated into the parking lot & lined their caskets up,// as though anxious for the ruined market/ to open" (so surreal -- the unearthed dead positioned in an everyday activity). There is also a certain sameness of tone across the collection as a whole -- as if grief is a perpetual quest of revisiting the past, never distracted.

On balance, a 4/5: some beautiful imagery, but has the potential to go further as an artistic product.

[Elizabeth Holt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some Ether is a downer. Normally, I am one to cling to depressing topics as a form of art and expression; you always get the best reaction from an audience that way. However, when it comes to Some Ether I don’t feel anything. I could never connect to his words because it felt as though he, himself didn't understand them. The book itself deals with suicide, death, loss of human contact and the inability to move on. It is split into four sections that focus on his mother, before and after her suicide, his childhood and growing up, the relationship with his father, and finally ending with sex and love, or the distance from love.

In this book it feels as though Flynn is too clever for his own good. Trying too hard to be creative and write outline the lines.

There were however, a handful of poems that I enjoyed and that were understandable. My favorite poem in this book is Sudden. It was one of the only times I understood what the speaker felt, the clear images, the beautiful, simplicity of language, painted the abrupt, resonating grief. This was a poem that said more with less, which is something that Flynn was desperately lacking throughout the rest of this book.

This book is seemingly dismal, though I did not feel many emotions while reading it. When I read poetry I want to feel something, and though Flynn has some very stunning moments, when I read this book of poetry I feel next to nothing.

[M.W. Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nick Flynn's _Some Ether_ receives three stars from me. The poems are fine, but none really stand out in my memory.

What I remember most are the ideas or the situations that Flynn builds in the poems as a whole. This not a collection of happy poems or hopeful poems, even when a poem has a slight happiness to it there is always a cloud around. The poems all seem free verse to me, but I could be wrong. I didn't count syllables. Visually the poems have a varied look on the pages, which I liked. I guess my real and only negative is that nothing seems to be sticking with me. Even in poetry collections, a few poems will stand out as something I liked, but with this one not.

The story Flynn tells is fragmented, and I think this is ok as it parallels the life of the speaker of the poems.

Recommended: sure. I think people who like poetry might enjoy these; while they are not technically as sophisticated as other collections I've read, they are enjoyable and interesting. Also, I think people new to poetry might enjoy them from time to time. The language is accessible which would be good for people not exposed to much poetry.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Flynn's "another bullshit night in suck city: A memoir" and naturally assumed that sense and style of prose would follow henceforth in a book of poetry. For the most part, Flynn stuck to his guns writing directly from his guts and heart no matter the outcome. As with most poetry, the words are just a guideline, the reader creates the imagery and meaning from the words in front of them.

The meaning I got from at least 80% of the poems in this book, was complete and on uncontrollable sorrow. Incredibly severe abandonment issues, coupled with the unappreciation of life, an a complete obsession with death.

I really enjoyed "Radio Thin Air" feeling that this was the most thought out poem in the entire book. Flynn still has quite a few books of poetry out, that I would be interested in reading. I would recommend this book to anyone dealing with the loss of a loved one, or severe depression.

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dark, beautiful debut collection in which Flynn comes to face many of the ghosts of his past--his dead mother, his homeless father, a wayward version of himself trying desperately to love but seeming to screw up along the way. While he never quite reaches redemption, by the end the speaker in many of these poems at least can imagine the possibility of it, which is a huge step.

Prior to reading this, I read Flynn's memoir Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. While I preferred this book, I feel like the memoir offers a lot of background information that helps with the understanding of these poems.

[Allison Goldstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nick Flynn's first published book. It's just incredible, refreshing, heartbreaking, and inspiring. I've probably read it dozens of times and never get bored. His voice is just the right combo of intense and reflective. He also achieves this remarkable balance between commmenting on a rather insane childhood without letting it totally define who is his, or allow it to become a pity party. It's like if Sharon Olds could let go of her bitterness and just take it all in from a different vantage point. You should really just read it.

[Victoria Chow · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first time reading any of Nick Flynn's poetry, and I hate to admit that I was disappointed. I wonder how such a beautiful, wonderful memoirist, whose prose is so poetic, can have poetry that doesn't interest me at all. I don't know too much about the form, but I've read poetry that I've loved, and this wasn't it. I love Nick Flynn to death, and this doesn't make me love him any less, but I'm sad that I can't enjoy his poetry the same way I enjoy his prose. The most memorable, for me, in the collection was "Glass Slipper."

[D'Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to really, really love this book. I really did. It's a good book, don't get me wrong. But it's really front loaded for me. The middle sections just didn't have the same power as the beginning for me. If the book was only the first section and a scattering of the other poems, I would have given it five stars, easy. Who knows, maybe I'll go back to it years from now and think, "How foolish I was then."

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3 1/2. I don't know how much Flynn obsesses over his mother and father in other books, but these poems felt topically v. one-note, though many of them were incredibly beautiful. As a collection the tonal range just isn't there. I found that I "got" many of the poems completely on my first read, which, for me, is unsatisfying. Still, I'd like to read more of his work.

[Mirror · Rating 3 out of 5]

This thing is made interesting by virtue of the existence of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. The oft-quoted finger-snapping quote is the best thing here, but fuck me if it isn't devastating. God knows why this seems to get more flak than anything else on my poetry reading list, including Dean Young's stuff.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pretty stunning debut.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous, luscious poems which are great to read after having read his memoir. However, forced to choose between the two, I'd still choose "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City" hands down.

[André · Rating 4 out of 5]

Citaat : 'Plotseling' Als het een hartaanval was geweest, zou de krant het woord groots hebben gebruikt, alsof een berg zich in haar had geopend, maar in plaats daarvoor gebruikte men het woord plotseling, een licht dat aangaat in een lege kamer (...) Als het terminaal zou zijn geweest, hadden we haar kunnen wiegen terwijl ze kleiner werd, haar mond afgeveegd, gedag gezegd.
Review : Nick Flynn (1960) is een docent letterkunde die twee essentiele ervaringen in zijn leven -de zelfmoord van zijn moeder en het daklozenbestaan van zijn vader- verwerkte tot respectievelijk een dichtbundel en een memoire in prozavorm. In de bundel Ether beschrijft de auteur in 48 gedichten en in vrije versvorm de psychische teloorgang van zijn moeder, eindigend in haar zelfverkozen dood, en hoe hijzelf daarop reageerde en wat hij nu daarbij voelt.



De gedichten zijn rauw, vol harde details en specifieke jeugdherinneringen, soms associatief en droomachtig, alsof de dichter in een soort vogelvlucht zijn leven beschouwt, maar altijd komt hij weer terug bij zijn eenzame moeder en haar ongrijpbare daad. Misschien niet altijd even begrijpelijk en gepolijst, maar wel steeds pregnant met betekenis, doorleefd en oprecht.

Ether is een verbijsterend aangrijpend poëziedebuut: het ontroerende monument dat de jonge dichter opricht voor zijn door zelfmoord om het leven gekomen moeder en een genadeloos maar niet zonder liefde neergezet portret van zijn dakloze vader. Centraal staat de vraag naar het 'waarom', en vraagt die Flynn middels een indrukwekkend collage van herinneringen en bespiegelingen tracht te beantwoorden, maar waarop eigenlijk geen echt antwoord bestaat. Ether beschrijft heel aangrijpend de ontreddering van het kind dat al jong beseft dat zijn ouders nog minder in staat zijn het leven te hanteren dan hijzelf.

[Tamas O'Doughda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm rounding up to 3, but more so out of not wanting to give it a 2, rather than wanting to give it a 3. There are a few poems, particularly Salt, that I really appreciated. There are a few powerful ideas and images throughout. But for the most part, many of these poems passed by without really striking a chord for me. There is a sense of loss and hurt, and the most effective poems found a way to tie that to an image, such as the metaphor of how a person falling asleep in public and jolting awake encapsulates the lifestyle of a brain-fogged substance abuser, or how drawing a door in chalk could represent childish imagination yet ultimate isolation. More of that would've been welcome. Otherwise, they sort of floated without saying too much.

I'm not sure how I came to own a copy of this book, but will be giving it to a tiny library and hope that it finds a welcoming home.

[Angélique (Angel) · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first word that comes to mind when I think of this collection is distant. While I appreciate the vivid descriptions and strong, precise wording found throughout this collection, I struggled with the emotional distance that I felt in most of these poems. Despite the emotional weight of many of the topics Flynn discussed, I often felt like I was only allowed access to the tip of the iceberg of emotions as I was reading. It was rare that I felt truly submerged in the feelings he was trying to portray which left me wanting more after almost every poem. I recognize the distance I felt might be due to an intentional stylistic choice since navigating distance between himself and some of the poem subjects was a major theme in the collection, but it still didn’t work well for me most of the time. Ultimately, I felt like this was a mediocre collection with a few stand out poems.