These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed.
What I noticed first about Nancy Kuhl’s chapbook Little Winter Theater was not just the emotional depth of the poems, but the lines themselves. Kuhl’s words build themselves into crescendo:
…the secrets aren’t
the interesting part the only part
tonight will be winter and we may
go under we may yet drown and here
in possibility’s dim and quavering
strike I would peel skin from knuckle
and wrist I would give jawbone
or eyelid or tongue(“Echo’s Body”)
Perhaps I’m giving too much away too early, but I want you to watch with me how these poems build into fierceness; with Kuhl, there is no turning back. Little Winter Theater details a rough spot in a relationship. As readers we are given no other information but what is in the poems, no history of the relationship, no names, nothing to base a story upon. If Kuhl were to give us this information, the fire would go out of these poems. All we need pay attention to is what goes on while we’re in this room, this little theater, where we wait with the speaker for something to happen:
my suspended second story
tilts keen and madly swaying
wild a ship’s transom untethered(“Fray”)
and
It might collapse at any moment, the room;
might come apart at the seams. Drifts in mistin rain; wind shook everything, almost shook
everything loose.(“Morning Provisional”)
We sit in an idling car with the speaker, receiving then later waiting for a text message
to appear on the phone:
…our momentary
messages collecting in phonelight
and the voice braids itself backward
a new silence pushes lexicon
to the brink(“TXT”)
and later:
And O tiny phone, flat
and shining and still,O won’t you?
(“Waiting, With Prayer”)
We watch as the partners return to one another and mirror each other in their desire:
…the way fingers
give up their secret in clumsy
silk unbuttonings now
I’ve forgotten what you said
about the echo chamber precision
of our speech because
the condition of this knowledge
is visual alone it’s between us(“Language of Mirrors”)
The poem “Language of Mirrors” speaks to a theme that runs throughout the poems: the echo. In this poem, what happens between the two lovers will echo beyond this moment, and in other poems, word spoken echo as well: “echo speaks / first return returning refrain resounding / voice voice voice and oh how I listen” (“Echo’s Voice”). Further on, the echo becomes only words lost in desire –I want and I want more of everything / illuminated page tedious marks / the sender is only echo (“Network, Constellation”)—and starts to become lost entirely as “sound decaying within the ear” (“Grieving Narcissus”). With these echoes, these sounds, Kuhl leads us to a place where the speaker remembers speech and breath, desire falling among them:
your voice never wavered
same little words like a fistto back like a hard fall the air
knocked out still wantingregardless
and
the moment dark imagines itself
back in time at once this ishow the body understands mouth
and breath(“Reckoning”)
These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. Even when we sit still in a room or in a car, waiting, the words won’t let us be: words spoken, words texted, the multi-literacies of touch. These are poems that speak, that rush, but take your time with these poems. Read them slowly, no matter how much they want to speed. Pay attention to Kuhl’s use of the poetic line. These are poems to savor, to study, to bring to the space of our own lives.
