All the farmer will find us to have left behind in that place
will be the smaller duck
the one that dives and hides. Everything else
eaten or taken, even the skunk cabbage
broken, stinking near the creek.
Some of the bark on the trees
cut away by things we tied to them.
Bits of spider web cling to my cheek.
A stunning milito-pastoral in daguerreotype, fading to amber at the edges.
Ted Mathys
Part historical fiction and part nature poem, Newcomer takes place in a wartime landscape estranged by nostalgia and American story-telling. A soldier passes through a landscape that is mutable, both familiar and foreign, while memories of home come in waves, receding and reappearing in images of crisp grass and in the sounds of wind. Military epic mixes with pastoral romance, and neither are resolved. Instead, Newcomer’s investigation of entropic minutia suggests a very contemporary (perhaps post-traumatic) confusion of temporality, and by this turns our thoughts toward a phenomenology of historical imagination.
Nathaniel Farrell was born and raised in Western Pennsylvania. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of Newcomer (UDP) — a personae poem narrated by an anonymous soldier and set in an undefined military campaign — and Lost Horizon (forthcoming, UDP), a long poem inspired by the American mall, interstate landscapes and suburban pastorals. He teaches composition at Washington University in St. Louis and hosts a weekly experimental music program on 88.1 KDHX, St. Louis’ community-supported, freeform radio station. Farrell’s poetry has been published in 6×6, New York Nights, Greetings Magazine, VLAK, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Recluse. His collages have been exhibited at Bushel (Delhi, NY), and Some Other Ways — his collaborative poetic project with Jessica Baran on the first month of Trump’s presidency — was part of the World Chess Hall of Fame’s Imagery of Chess exhibition.
These are Nathaniel Farrell’s poems, of course, but when I read them they are mine, too: common life told with common words, resounding and clean. Their setting may be historical, ostensibly the Civil War, but their concerns are the stuff of daily life, glimpsed from porches and saddles and moonlit camps and recorded with quiet intensity. The simple counters of weather, family, fields, and roads make for homesick songs that anyone might sing. In an age of hard trying, such anonymity is a virtue and a pleasure.
Devin Johnston
With mesmerizing grace, Nathaniel Farrell’s poem sequence interlaces the world of memory with radically immediate impressions of the land. Sense exceeds circumstance as a soldier from an indeterminate time, fighting an indeterminate war, moves through new country, grasping at the specters of the rural life he left. In faceted lines and precise diction, Farrell creates a landscape where the enemy may have just passed “the same hawks menaced by little birds,” where soldiers become “nothing more than needle and thread / pushed and pulled in and out of the land.” Newcomer is a stunning milito-pastoral in daguerreotype, fading to amber at the edges.
Ted Mathys
The body is strongly present everywhere in Newcomer. The body of the soldier who feels the weight of wet wool, the body of the child who is both dreaming about a pony and "feeling small and knobby as a pony," the traveler patting the dog: "its torso an echo chamber / for the palm." Stones in the grass becomes "like tiny teeth in the distance." Images like these appear all throughout the collection, and with them Farrell builds simple, but moving expressions for the narrators orientation in the world, and for his homebound gaze. Simplicity, precision and sometimes a kind of mystery that few poets manage to accomplish: One will find all of this in Farrell's book.
Carina Elisabeth Beddari
ISBN: 978-1-937027-36-0
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 72 pp, 5.87 x 7.75 in
Publication Date: June 01 2014
Distribution: SPD