Through One Tear: Poems

Edward Nobles, Author Persea Books $22 (80p) ISBN 978-0-89255-227-6

This challenging first collection grapples with large questions in unexpected ways. “Is heritage the honing or the rusting of the blade?” Nobles asks in one poem. In another: “How can we/ trick you/ into your self,//dear life?” For the skeptical but hopeful Nobles, however, the central question is the value of life: “How to make a moment matter? Tears, toil, darkness/ can't do it. Nor tradition. Nor lines around/ the eyes and mouth.” Trying to answer such questions, Nobles turns to the figure of the artist, whom he often dramatizes as a warrior. He writes of Ezra Pound, the surrealists, Van Gogh. He finds that “The ship moves/ against the sea. And the men,/ those bleak anomalies, move within the ship.” The core of this outstanding collection are the poems in which Nobles addresses the question of faith and in which his sardonic wit and yearning for meaning play against each other in powerful ways. He argues with himself: “The soul/ is something. Must be/ something. At least/ a dream/ in a small, thin/ box. You cannot/ see, but feel/ its buzz/ die when you/ block/ your heart's ear.” In “Thorn of Light,” a poem reminiscent of fellow New Englander Robert Frost, Nobles's inner argument comes to an uneasy conclusion as he writes of walking down a path through the woods and realizing that “each and every tree can be transformed/ into a Cross/ if we could only find the interest.” (June)

Through One Tear

Edward Nobles

Persea Books, $22

The poems in this first book come to us, like those of Wallace Stevens, filled with conundrum. Nobles is a master at transforming the ordinary by viewing it from alternating angles or through small slits, and always at a cool remove. Sometimes dream states blink back and forth until they too accumulate in clear vision. Nobles gives us the world from both sides of every window; he takes us to a height so we can look down and see ourselves looking up. His keen intelligence keeps the frequent metamorphosis from becoming dizzying or contrived. This looking and re-looking is clearly in the service of precision: what Nobles ultimately achieve is an exact and moving expression of how it is to be human at this particular historical moment. And he does it without resorting to the logarithm of easy sentiment or inconsequential personal details. He is obviously aware, as he writes in "Through the Desert," that "a fine line means so much." — Mary Jo Bang

“In these powerful and poignant utterances, one learns and believes that ‘mourning is a thread of common life.’ Recommended.”

Library Journal

“a tour de force.”

Jeff Mock review in Quarterly West

“Nobles is a restless, inventive, experimental writer . . . What his poems share isn’t a method but a sensibility... In this poet’s hands [Elizabeth] Bishop’s patient enumerations of phenomena turns, almost without our seeing how, into troubled and candid self-examination . . . A scrutinizer of the soul’s troubles, he habitually sees--and sees from--the inside and outside at once... Nobles is a daring and accomplished truth-teller... impressive.”

Rachel Hadas review in Kenyon Review

“…Compression gives specific density to complex thought…Nobles’ voice moves unobtrusively between realms (of fact and metaphor, physical and metaphysical), forcing the reader to slow down and pay close attention…Nobles’ is also deft at turning a narrative or narrative fragment into a fable or parable.”

Eamon Grennan review in Parnassus

“For all the skill and singularity Nobles exhibits this is not a likable book—but then neither are Baudelaire’s Les Fleur du Mal nor Ted Hughe’s Crow nor Sylvia Plath’s Ariel...”

Fred Muratori review in Georgia Review

“…the dimensions of the career—its time and space, as it were—are worth noting, especially for poets such as [Nobles], who cannot be identified with any current school or style and who [is] clearly determined to make [his] own way, countercontinuities shaping the truly original…”

Norman Finkelstein review in Denver Quarterly

“Nobles is probably the only poet who can begin a poem ‘I pull her panties to the floor,’ and, by the end, jump to a Duchamp-like magnified image of a ‘red-yellow/marble’ that ‘rolls through the dust and stops at a penny’”

Miriam Levine review in American Book Review

“These are extraordinarily well-crafted poems . . . The poet’s intense care for language and precise—and honest—phrasing is evident in every line… These poems pull few punches, even at unsavory moments. They are not easy poems; they fall into a category of poetry that is unconventionally metaphorical and gorgeously unorthodox in diction and approach, a category that includes, among other poets, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery.”

Dana Wilde review in The Bangor Daily News