April

Whether juxtaposing and dismantling depictions of the rape of Leda in art; crafting a sonnet crown responding to a character in an Iris Murdoch novel; or examining the limitations of prepositions, Sara Nicholson, in her newest collection, April, considers the world slant. Her enjambments are emphatically surprising:

Something about the music grief is
Either prey to or heir to
Falls flat, the same way art is
Subject to its objects: larks & light

Sometimes funny, sometimes obsessed with the visual even while centering language, the speaker of these poems has opinions about the world and making. Her original vantage sparks when she skirts the line between ars poetica and artist statement. In “Nut,” the speaker says: “It is natural to be petty about beauty” and “The plastic tub of bluets / In my neighbor’s backyard / Embarrasses me.” Even, we learn,

Textures make me nervous:
The trunks of trees,
The flesh of the octopus, its suckers,
Hair and horns.
What is it about the abstract
words for feelings that bothers me?

Not everything here is a concise lyric. “I want to read poems like the monks read scripture,” the speaker says in the “Lives of the Saints,” a series of prose statements that range from aphorisms and reflections to briefly opined-upon quotes or historical anecdotes:

Elizabeth Barret Browning, “earth’s fanatics make / Too frequently heaven’s saints.” How we love to read about eccentric people. How we hate to meet them in real life.

Artistic aims and claims share space with the life that shapes and impedes them: the realities of writers’ working lives pop up in the closing punch of the first section of the final poem, “Ten Lyric Pieces”:

A darling prospect this: that art
Would infect us with its bullet points
And level sights with words, but
That’s what it was like, adjuncting
In the year we said we wouldn’t.