Negotiating Reality and a Feminist Ecology in Kathryn Nuernberger’s “Rue”
What is the difference between escaping from reality and seeking solace in a space that is located somewhere between reality and an internal world of narrative, where one hasn’t quite crossed over into the realm of the imaginary yet? Does this mean emotionally settling into a sense of defeat, of resignation?
These questions recurred in my mind while reading Kathryn Nuernberger’s newest poetry collection, Rue, questions that are indirectly addressed by Nuernberger herself through her poems. In the narrative that runs through Rue, the reader follows the accounts of a female speaker living in a conservative small town as she documents her turbulent, even unhappy, marriage, wishing “to/ know how it feels to be nothing but untapped/ potential,” while simultaneously baring to the reader her love and worry for her daughter, perhaps most touchingly in “The Bird of Paradise”:
I’m making a little notebook of pressed flowers
with my daughter. We learn their names in Latin
and we learn the names the midwife-witches
would have used. If they are safe to eat, we eat
them; we brew them and dry them and salve them.
It is a way to know them and a way to know
ourselves as creatures among them.
Nuernberger also gives the reader a glimpse into the speaker’s thoughts on topics ranging from poking fun at the pompous scale of Professionalism in “A Difficult Woman” to a Lee Bontecou retrospective to the sight of a bald man in a sleek jacket at a local coffee shop who becomes an entry point for the speaker’s internal contemplation about the impeding “time/ […] when I’ll grow a mustache and my calyx/ will turn to sandpaper. I’ll be a volcano for a while,/ then a crater, then a little sack of dusty bones.”
The personal nature of Rue, where the first-person “I” feels less like it is speaking outward to the reader and more as a way of reaching back into the self and documenting, gives Nuernberger’s collection a diary-like quality. Yet Rue is distinctly not a diary. For those who might prefer to think of it as a kind of personal document, Rue is something closer to a “thought journal” that not only records and keeps track of things but is also a space inhabited by things the speaker wishes to say but does not say, as in the poem “Things I Did Today Besides,” where poetry is seen to perform a similar role of communicating without speaking between the speaker and her friend:
She and I feel so many of the same
things that we only communicate them via poems. Part
of what we have in common is that we’d never talk about
an affair out loud, much less have one. Unless one of us
actually has one.
Similarly, despite situating her speaker within a relatively specific circumstances — a married woman with a child, living in a rural town in a conservative state — the narrative that Nuernberger gives to Rue remains the right level of ambiguous. We do not ask who the speaker is because she speaks to something greater than mere individual experience. The things that seem personal, like the speaker’s contemplation of birth in “Poor Crow’s Got Too Much Fight to Live,” instead revolve around the bigger, all-encompassing issue of the patriarchy, of respect and care for the female body, which Nuernberger, in this case, sees manifested in the fact that “A woman/ isn’t supposed to be grateful to a man for birthing/ the baby for her.”
Dotting the collection and functioning much like the lines connecting stars in diagrams of constellations are poems about flowers, botanists like Anna Atkins, Marian Merian, and Carl Linnaeus (one of my favourite passages in Rue was the rare instance where the speaker addresses the reader in what is a quasi-love letter for Linnaeus in “Whale-Mouse,” telling us, “I need you to love him too” for the way “every species becomes/ a metaphor for some other genus or species/ until the flowers are toads and the toads/ are fish and the fish are the flowers.”) On one hand, these poems can be read as an escape from the struggles of everyday life into the world of books, history, and science, yet that would mean overlooking the way Nuernberger uses these poems as a way of revealing both the magic and the complexity inherent in history and science and the history of science, the magic we sometimes think it lacks. This magic can horrify as much as it can amaze, as the poem “A Natural History of Columbine” attests, shifting from the plant’s symbolic and medicinal history to its namesake Columbine, “the dancing beauty” who “learn[ed] how funny/ it was to see a man beat a woman bloody.”
As well as embodying the collection’s central theme of women’s knowledge, a theme that runs through Rue in two parallel forms — the speaker’s experiences in her town and the female ecologists and medicine women with their knowledge of herbs and flowers — the botanical poems also recall the Victorian language of flowers. Unlike in the Victorian era, where the flowers were seen as a way of connecting people together and symbolically conveying one’s thoughts and intentions to another individual, the language of flowers in Rue is turned inward, a relationship between the self and the body that is founded on more personal and intimate forms of knowledge that have been dismissed by “the minds of […] great thinkers/ [who] call[ed] it rumors and old wives tales. As if none of us/ has ever needed an old wife. As if only fools would/ allow themselves to turn into such wizened things.” The body becomes the greatest monument to love in Rue, something that has historically been denied to the female body for a long time but which, in the poems of Nuernberger, is given the love and care it needs and deserves.
Nearing the end of the collection, the sense of suspended timelessness, the kind you might get when leafing through someone’s notebook and becoming aware of the space and time that separates you, that permeates the entirety of Rue increases. The last few poems in particular contain a different kind of somberness, as if the speaker has faded away even further, leaving behind whatever semblance of identity she had. We are therefore left, once again, with the question with which I began this review: are the poems in Rue an attempt to escape from or a desire to understand, and what is it that they are trying to escape or understand? This “what” is left undefined for Nuernberger, just as there is no clear answer when it comes to talking about how to cope and find comfort in our still-imperfect world. What Rue offers its readers is a way, through the speaker’s narrative and thoughts, to be conscious of ourselves and our bodies, the way they exist within a number of complex systems that range from the factual realms of medicine to the more overtly constructed social realm of society. We are reading with the speaker the same way that she is reading historical texts, like her seeking a way to ground ourselves.
