Other-Wise

by Robbi Nester

In a style meditative, lyrical, succinct and spare, Robbi Nester turns her poet’s seeing eye and hearing ear, perked for the intriguing, very much towards a world full of “others”—bees, binturongs, muskrats, sea lions, luna moths, swallowtails, orchids, seventeen-year locusts, the Bedouin in the desert, the dead—in ways that respect their otherness, yet always touch our human selves. The self is here, too, born out of the “meager means” of a childhood—with a “grim gargoyle” of a father “full of fury”—yet, learning “how to take / the little that I had / making it more than suffice.” These are poems lit by metaphors and codas of startling beauty and rightness. A seal with its eyes shut spins in “calm face composed, resembling a dead pharaoh / wrapped tight within his gold / sarcophagus, entering / the next world.” For that Bedouin whose desert is like the “Far away, the surf rises / arched wings of the angel, / messenger of the desert God, / whose silence contains everything.” There is joy here at being in the center of “everything that is,” hardly able to sleep “in all this brightness,” joy in the hands that “can close / the circuit between body /and mind,” in the hand that can, indeed, write “it all down.” Judy Kronenfeld Open Other-Wise and enter Robbi Nester’s acutely observed world. There are two places to look for the poem—inside one’s self or outside one’s self. The best poets begin one place and reach the other, as Nester does in “Seal”: I watched one spin in place/ eyes closed, as I did once at five, / falling in a dizzy heap to watch/the room spin, the familiar/turning alien but quickly taking shape/ . . . I admit my favorite section is the third, entitled Me; it is here that Nester turns her laser gaze to the brutal terrain of childhood and the poems that emerge are clear, startling, unforgettable, and necessary. The poem “Labor Day,” about her teen-aged job in an aquarium, prefigures her "couldn’t keep quiet / if customers / or bosses were wrong. / I never changed, / whatever job I was doing— / still telling people / what they didn’t / want to hear." Now so many years later, Nester is still on the job, but it is the proper work of the poet to tell the human village the stories they don’t want, but need, to hear. Donna Hilbert Robbi Nester's Other-Wise opens and closes with bracing images of the part soothing nature, part visceral instinct, all mirrored in our own lives that flit between control and chaos. In a pet-store cage, a binturong invites a bemused crowd, "as if savagery itself / were locked away / behind the flimsy wire." The ensuing pages ask how effective that wire truly is. Nester's poems here are stories of cages—schools, summer camps, workplaces, even the improvised shelter of a book tucked in the pants to cushion a father's blow. Sometimes, like the birds who soar inscrutably above, we triumph by fleeing our confines. Other times, we find solace within them—"the blue perfection of the bottom" of the swimming pool that we claim by our refusal to float.” Michael Miller

94 pages, Paperback

Published May 17, 2017