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.

Skynet Becomes Self-Aware At 2:14 A.M. Eastern Time, August 29th

If I were still working with John Fitzgerald (in the interest of full disclosure, we worked together at Red Hen Press), I would nudge him and say of his book THE MIND, “Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th.”

My sense of John is that he has been aware of himself for a long time, but not in a solipsistic or narcissistic way at all. He is a keen observer, a consumer of origins, fine distinctions, continua, grand schemes, and minute details. He likely began observing and contemplating information from the moment he experienced the glare of light in the delivery room, and he has never stopped.

Interestingly, while THE MIND is about the remarkable way John thinks, it speaks to the larger questions of how we all think, how we came to be sapient in the first place, and how we develop as thinking souls in space and time. Keeping the language of his prose-like tercets basic, unadorned, and free-flowing, he accomplishes poetry of significance and elemental beauty. Left brain contemplation of structure and systems aligns itself with right brain wonder and whimsy, but neither hemisphere dominates in the work, so the reader can only expect the unexpected. And the rewards are great: poems of curiosity, orientation with the universe, sorrow, finding center, and surprising hilarity. (Only John can make the idea of rocks funny.)

If I were teaching from John’s book, I would encourage poetry students to examine his masterful skill with personification. I would encourage philosophy students to wrestle with his experiences of phenomena. I would ask psychology and neurobiology candidates to experience the brain from inside-out. I would ask physics students to explore how we process space and time in an era when such concepts are continually challenged and updated. I would ask divinity students to consider creation from the point of view of the created. THE MIND weighs so many approaches to thinking and being that you won’t devour it in one or two sittings. Read it as you would the Book of Genesis, or Hawking, or an introduction to meditation. You will not think the same way ever again after reading it.