Moving and Mesmerizing: A Review of Robert Wrigley's Nemerov's Door

Nemerov’s Door is a collection of eleven autobiographical essays about poetry. It is both moving and mesmerizing. Themes that pop up throughout include family; mortality; politics, nature, man’s relationship to nature, and most essentially, poetry: what it is, how to read it, and why it matters. In form the book is a hybrid: part poetry/part prose; part academic essay/part autobiography; part bildungsroman/part ars poetica; part nature diary/part spiritual meditation.

On the day I received the book, I decided to wade in, reading just one chapter before bed. Instead, I didn’t put the book down until two hours later, having read ten of the eleven essays. You might say that this a book about rivers that pulls you in like a river.

There is an element of hodge-podge among the essays, as if Wrigley threw essays in to fill out the book. You’ll find essays here about My Fair Lady; Frank Sinatra; arrowheads; the Salmon River in Idaho; and the book concludes with a wonderful long poem to Wrigley’s children, largely about Idaho and the state of the nation. But the core of the book, and my favorite part of it, is a series of close readings of the poetry of a handful of modern American poets: Richard Hugo, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Etheridge Knight, James Dickey, and Sylvia Plath.

Early on Wrigley writes that none of these essays would exist if it weren’t for his being a teacher and it is easy to imagine him as an excellent one. About halfway through, I began to feel like Dante being led down the corridors of poetry by Virgil. As a teacher, Wrigley is plain spoken but enthusiastic, esoteric without ever being scholarly or dry. He’s madly in love with poetry and unafraid to say so. (He describes his entry into poetry at age 21 as walking into a cathedral he had passed many times with disinterest). He has an excellent ear and is keenly attuned to the music of poetry which he describes as the condition of poetry. He describes poets as working with the “fierce concentration” of a “ditch digger” or “mountain climber.”

Wrigley doesn’t suffer much hubris. He is aware of his status as a privileged white male, stating in his essay on Etheridge Knight that out of the 39 poets included in Donald Hall’s anthology Contemporary American Poetry, 0 are black women; 1 is a black man; 4 are white women; and and 34 are white males. “Based on the evidence I had at hand, [I deduced poets] were pretty much all white men.“ It is significant then that of the five essays dedicated to close readings of modern American poets, one is devoted to a black poet (Etheridge Knight) and one to a woman (Sylvia Plath).

I entered the Plath chapter with some skepticism, with a feminist feeling of “ok, show me what you’ve got,” but Wrigley did well with the subject, calling the poems of Ariel a kind of “hyper-lucid and incendiary suicide note” whose emotional content is “sheer force” written by an “agonized consciousness” (90) living in a state of “terrified introspection.” Such, he writes, was her “electrified suffering” and the “strange ecstatic horrors” of her situation that she exhibits a “monstrous sensitivity” like Van Gogh’s. In a line that’s flat out funny he writes that if Sylvia Plath were a character in one of his son’s NBA video games, “her every drive on the basketball court would be trailed by flames.” In the last days before her suicide, he writes, “She was on fire. She was in another place. She had left the rest of us behind. She felt more than most of us ever will for any reason....She [was] seeing into the heart of things.”

With the possible exception of the beautifully conducted close reading of Richard Hugo’s “Trout” (“The Music of Sense”), “Nemerov’s Door” is the book’s most powerful essay and is itself more poem than essay. That eponymous essay is a meditation on Wrigley’s relationship with his father, a car salesman with little aptitude for poetry. In the essay father and son blur, passing in and out of each other like ghosts. The “door” of the title is the door of poetry the poet’s father almost supernaturally leads his son to. It’s a mystical essay brimming with love, the strangeness of life, and the fluidity of generations. “Somehow,” he writes, “in all of this you are yourself and you are your father and you are the small boy in Nemerov’s ‘The View from an Attic Window’ coming into the knowledge of time and mortality.”

But what makes the book most mystical is Wrigley’s John McPhee-like appreciation for nature. One of the book’s most striking moments is Wrigley’s description of waking up on a beach with his son and seeing the sky bent down low over them “all eyes and personality,” as if the cosmos were a curious and gentle creature intimately staring at this sleeping man and his son. Another is his description of waking up on a rock in the wilderness to find a group of coyotes staring from a distance, wondering whether he was dead or alive. Another a description of coming upon a bear in the wilderness rearing on hind legs transfixed by a host of yellow butterflies in front of its nose. These glittering images and many more are scattered across the forest floor of this book.

You will get the most out of this book if you are a poet or at least seriously interested in poetry, but in truth, any sensitive person—especially any person in love with the idea of disappearing negatively capable into nature—can be pulled into these essays as easily as into a river you won’t mind floating—or drowning—in.