Traveling to Find the Way Back Home: A Review of THE FORGOTTEN WORLD by Nick Courtright

Nick Courtright’s collection The Forgotten World serves as both a travel guide, with the countries he visits indicated in each section, and a collage of connected memories. While the poet seems to invite the reader along, the persona in the poems is a solitary figure, even when a lover or fellow travelers inhabit the poems. What ties the poems together is a sense of alienation. The collection opens with a call to prayer the speaker cannot answer in “Facing Mecca,” juxtaposing images of Walmart and test scores—first world concerns—with dirhams, cobras, and niqabs.

In the first section, titled “Forgotten,” (like the other two divisions of the book), the speaker acknowledges feeling out of place, noting in “I Cannot Enter the Mosque”:

When irreligious
you can only go some places,

like bars, or houses, or heaven.
But I can’t go here . . .

Whether in Morocco, Ecuador, Paris or London, the speaker finds himself in mosques, chapels and cathedrals, never places of comfort for him. Likewise, the focus on the culture and the history of each place visited seems to highlight guilt as “a spoiled American / who is a voyeur on the. heritage of those / who have heritage. . . .”

Courtright chronicles the time “Before Falling Out of Love,” telling his lover:

I couldn’t really make sense
of my happiness . . .

. . . You were there
and I couldn’t make sense of it.

Through the poem, though, he moves from his incredulity at “fucking in Africa” amid warthogs and zebras to his ironic observation, “Eventually I’ll be back / in my bed in America after having / set my family on fire…” Courtright follows with “Falling Out of Love,” bearing images of a house afire, a setting in stark contrast to Africa:

The flame moves in on the house this weekend,
the clever box and its faux wood flooring
and whitewash cabinets, too many white
cabinets, the flame moving in and through,

the flame brandishing its sad ancient dance
of romance and boyish extravagance . . .

The former lover—the you, half of we—has barely a presence.

Courtright also invokes the presence of artists and writers in the places he travels. In “Frida Kahlo Atop the Pyramid of the Sun,” he finds himself thinking of the artist, finding himself “a spy in her bedroom” as he sees “the dresses she wore, / the mirrors in which she became real.”

In “American Idiot,” the speaker, feeling out of place in South America, recalls Orwell’s autobiographical short story “Shooting an Elephant” in which he finally understands Orwell’s observation “that a colonist is always in a battle / not to be laughed at.” He notes that “the role of every white man in this world / is to shut up and take it / because so much of this bed you for yourself have made.”

The second section, set across Europe and Asia, opens with “Airplane to Bangkok,” on an overseas flight, the characters in the in-flight movie as real as the flight attendant, “Thirty years older and thirty for popularity” or the “aggressively elderly woman . . . / [who] did not smile at me when I smiled at her / Her fingers . . . twisted like the branches of desert trees . . .”

Some of the poems examine the seeming absurdity of sights he witnesses, the poverty and stacks of skulls in “Inside Everyone is a Skull,” as well as the repeated image of “A monkey [pulling] over the rope railing protecting a priceless / work of stone-carved temple art.”

Others are set in the artificial world of opulent airports, images of wealth and privilege that weigh on this lone traveler. In “Inside Everyone is a Wallet,” he finds himself in ‘The United Lounge for the wealthy and privileged.” He observes:

It’s difficult to decline such opportunity

As if that opulence weren’t enough to make anyone feel
awful 

There’s an elevator with golden sheen going up to a room
reserved for the Global First Class.

Ill at ease, the speaker continues to find himself in places of worship, considering transubstantiation and confession, the sacred and profane. He finds himself weeping, “God, please help me” in “the prayer-only section” of Notre Dame in “Happy New Year” or in Westminster Abbey, confessing to the reader, “I took the holy sacrament without belief” in “Insanity.”

Throughout this leg of the virtual tour through The Forgotten World, the poems conjure disparate images of literary figures. In Prague, he evokes images of “Good Kind Wenceslas”:

. . . boots in the snow,
like two bird in the snow,
striding with purpose
toward his aim, on the day-
of the feast of Stephen.”

The imaged conjured causes the speaker to “tear up / in an all-you-can-eat all-you-can / drink buffet in Budapest,” until he considers the king’s page, along on the wintry journey “with no agency.”

He imagines “Dracula’s Last Day,” as an anachronism, as he “gets up and responds to some emails, / texts a girl or two he’s been after,” ending the poem with a woman “stake in hand” knocking at his door.

In the final section of the collection, Courtright returns to the United States. The poems still echo with travel images but focus more on the domestic—fathers, mothers, and sons. Both as  son and as father of sons, the speaker bears the guilt of not loving his mother enough, not knowing how to offer his father consolation.

In “My Mother Shaving Her Legs,” he observes, “In time all children are disappointments . . . because they don’t love back the way they should.” Then he turns the tables, addressing his son in with images from his own travels in “Oblique Letter to Young Son as He Confronts Adolescent Loneliness for the First Time”:

When the water is all around you
you know you are the land, son.
. . . .
But
let’s not be bleak; you, son,

are the land, the firmament
filled with surprise. . .

Though the collection moves from travels abroad back to home, in the final section, Courtright draws on the motif of travel to unify this body of work. In “Apples,” he writes, “To travel the world is one thing / and to travel the mind / is the same thing” before declaring, “The time to wander prodigal / may be over but I’ll wonder / where wandering led.”

As Courtright concludes the third section of The Forgotten World, back in America, his readers are faced with timely cultural references as the poet unpacks the experiences, images, and conflicted feelings from his journey, until at last, in “We Can’t Leave the House,” the speaker finds himself with his children in the bubble that is home, “wait[ing] out the virus” with time to come to terms with who he is, who we are.

Seven Days: A Review of Nick Courtright's Let There Be Light

Mourning lost divinity is hard to tire of. Repetition only demonstrates its relevance. Thus the chiaroscuro longing of “Assomption de la Vierge,” sets a fitting mood for a book that starts in the modern moment and traces back through cosmo-biblical time.

The Virgin Mary has left the frame of Earth. Rapacious hands remain. Granted, the Virgin is not the Godhead. She is the goose that laid the golden egg. There are other egg-layings in this book. Beings emerge into the now, as if laying their own eggs, chrysalis-like, but with a mathematical stop-animation immediacy, as the time-step goes to zero. An egret begets itself from one moment to the next. We are asked to ponder its ontology through the infinite parcels of time.

In his latest book, Let There Be Light, Nick Courtright takes the time step beyond zero, going into negative intervals. This narrative traces back through 14 billion years and 7 biblical days in a varied collection of verse, discussing the death of stray cats, lyrical bridge crossings, cosmic background radiation, animal hunger, and the like.

Some stylistic choices provide obstacles in that path: endings are often unsatisfactory and ellipses are serially inserted. But these frustrations withstanding, the body of work provides a compelling meditation on the inflorescence of time and the senescent circumstances of modernity, in a cosmo-eco-biblical fullness found few places in verse.

Particularly satisfying are the lyrical modes pushing out against the time-conscious themes of this book. For example, the flagship poem “The Big Bang”, features “a finch making its sound from inside of joy,” an occurrence which only arises after the quanta of days, hours, seconds, weeks have been abandoned. “I thought, this, a day, is not a fraction I have to recognize / … nor the other products of separation.” The tweeting is brief, and its sound is enveloped by the surrounding rush of time, as if a wind. But still, it fights against that wind.

This is what good poems do, like finches: they expand the realm of the now, pushing out against the flow of time. Courtright does that in a poem about departure:

I walk through the front door, and you say
One day you will wake to find yourself finished.

I walk through the front door. Look at the time,
you say. Look at the time.

Your bags and my thousand flaming trees are full.
Hills fall over each other, rumpling their outfits.

“Look at the time” works ironically: the season and this relationship are late in their course, yes, but the moment commands more than its allotted span of minutes. In that sense, “Look at the time” says: I’d rather not talk to you anymore. Departures such as this become a part of the eternal present-moment for the grieving remnant. In this way, endings in this book can serve as fundamental lyric: when a sequence is cut short, it enters into a timelessness where all the preceding events are enshrined.

But the lyric that holds most prominence in this book occurs at the beginning of time. It is the ineffable presence of super-compressed proto-matter that exists before the big bang. This reservoir, immune to time’s arrow, mirrors a pre-expulsion Eden, mirrors the first day of a child’s life where everything is new, mirrors and presages every other lyric which pauses in the present while future potencies bide their time.

This Edenic lyric persists in fragments: angelic egrets stand guard as symbol and flag; a traveler pauses mid-bridge and sings reassurance to herself; riparian thought abides in black-faced gulls and barges that “pour their enormous stomachs across the river.” Time still flows in these echo-lyrics, but at a pace that suggests infinitude and continuity with all previous moments. It is worth dwelling in such moments, and Courtright’s incessant reminder of time’s cruelty empowers us to do just that.

The scientific perspective is key to knowing such cruelty, and Courtright uses it efficiently for that purpose. In a poem titled “Intelligent Design,” Courtright maps the age of the Universe against the metric of human existence. In “Lost on Planet Earth,” Earthworms move the terrain beneath our feet, making it suddenly new and alien when we look down again. This is what Courtright calls us to do repeatedly: to look down at the Earth that has changed and ask, “Is this okay?”  instead of “and God saw that it was good.”

Consider, in turn, the romantic longing that the cosmic in this collection provokes. In “The Deep,” the faint electromagnetic hum from the big bang – i.e. cosmic background radiation – is presented as “a phone ring[ing] unanswered into the vast universe.”

“Please, please eternity, leave your message –” the speaker pleads.

In this despair, Courtright’s own plea for the lyric rings out in the space of this collection. It is a thrilling meditation on the form, one which presents many sounds of the immutable and the corrupted.