Burnt Island

January 24, 2005
The poems of this eighth collection center on its vivid title—sometimes a metaphorical September 11–era Manhattan, sometimes a real place where older-and-wiser lovers retreat to sift themselves, and their relationship, from the ashes. When the poems fail, they fail badly: "I made friends/ with a dead sparrow/ I found on the sidewalk," for example, opens "Night Flight." But when they work, Nurkse's simple observations and images open out into a gloriously pulp defamiliarization. "Space Marriage" begins "Our starship blew up/ between Alpha Centaur/ and the Second Quadrant/ but we could not die." The terrific "Nine Crows" ("Remember our bright eyes?/ Our sarcastic weariness?") inaugurates a series of poems where flora and fauna perform, with a kind of disdainful bravura, a panoply of human fears and faiblesses
. Taken as a whole, the book moves through its various perspectives with more than enough assurance to carry one past the numerous weaker sections, making this the collection to bring Brooklyn's former poet laureate wider acclaim.