Without a doubt, and as the evidence of reading or hearing her poetry will certainly reveal, Isabel Nathaniel is definitely not a student of the "Ride, Fly, Fuck and Die" school of poetry for which the mainstream press recently has been, well, consumptive. The Dominion of Lights, a collection by one of the most accomplished poets in the North Texas area is, rather, in whole an intent communication of paradoxical and albeit intangible emotions, impressions and colorations which by their nature range in their use of language far beyond the scope of journalism, monologue, theater or narrative.
In fact, the essence of connoting the vast majority of an everyday human's experiences --something Ms. Nathaniel accepts as self-evident-- necessitates being able to talk --or write-- around the subject-at-hand in such a way that a reader, hearer or conversant actually shares that paradox, that mixed emotion, that you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. And things like the things described in Ms. Nathaniel's poems, things that never make it to the newsreel or the radio call-in show, happen to all of us all the time. Things happen while we are gardening or daydreaming or listening to the wind or our wives that are not dramatic or noteworthy enough to become part of the official version of America's so-called shared literacy. Such private experiences defy the expertise of our so-called experts, who can neither fathom the meaning of nor describe what is happening. Poetry is as integral to the health of our nation as economics, yet the truly cultivated mind seems to be disappearing with a giant sucking sound into the ionized blankness of a television screen, as the "underground status" of a poet such as Ms. Nathaniel illustrate.
All this is naturally a roundabout way of describing and placing within the great scheme of things the importance of what we might dub "The Dominion of Lights". Though this immediate yet almost shy neighborhood of living has been called many things by many men and women, few have had the skill to call-out the multicolored perplexities in such a way as to make them real to whoever is mature or caring enough to attend to the details deliberately left to the imagination. In fact, visual artists have come closer to its periphery than explorers in more abstract mediums, mainly because the outcome of an artist's muddling with paint and brushes is a direct mimicry of reality towards which many poets can only point and hint.
Ms. Nathaniel is particularly adept at translating the contradictory and almost hermeneutic nature of visual imagery into words. As a poet, she seems to know that poetry is not merely the outcome of being clever with words, but more importantly a matter of being alive and attentive to how art or music or even economics communicates this unspeakable speaking.
Her allusions, in this light, to a circle of 19th Century Impressionist painters are not unusual within the greater community of contemporary American poetry in the 1990's. Amy Clampitt covers similar ground in her volume, What the Light Was Like. What separates Ms. Nathaniel's work from the growing number of mature lyric poets who are finding a solid connection to the impressionists, however, is her sharp ability to acutely connect the intricacies and colorations of her landscape, a portrait or a still life with the details of her life. Most poets never get past using their various "objective correlatives" as symptoms of their inner longings, but Ms. Nathaniel is daring and gutsy enough to superimpose her own objective "stories" upon the objective "stories" she sees in a painting or hears in a song, concerto or symphony.
These allusions, of course, run far deeper than superficial name-dropping. Like the Impressionists, Ms. Nathaniel seems to grasp the problematic fact that a minuscule change in light or shadow can obliterate or transform a subtle mood into something altogether incongruent with one's original intent, but that the change itself, wild and beyond personal control as it might be, is somehow connected to one's original intent and therefore deserves our respect and sometimes our fear.
"Two Gardenias in a Vase" for example, is a lyric still life full of inner action sequences evoked, or at least on the surface, by the strong scent of whitish flowers trapped together in a glass vessel. "Now, soon, the sweetness is your own breath," the poet tells her generic listener, "until you can imagine the heroines / of Late Movies and Bette Davis..." One is impressed by poem's end, though, that the flowers themselves are as metaphorical as they are characteristic, orsymbolicc, or even emblematic.
The observation of this kind of phenomena occurring over and over again in the poetry of Ms. Nathaniel illuminates the particularly high calibre of her ability to pump every ounce of lead out of every word she chooses to use. Layers of meaning literally blossom like roses (or gardenias), inviting readers and hearers to experience what is happening to their own subjective states as they encounter boquet after boquet of skillfully expressed and always kindred experiences.
Being from Texas, Ms. Nathaniel --despite the fact that she has won numerous awards and has been published in magazines general readers probably don't even know existed-- is quite forthcoming with what more shallow commentators might dismiss as "local color." This genuflection towards Dallas, or Texas, an all-too-often ritual bow for to satisfy a local public anxious to learn that a real artist isn't ashamed of, say, Johnson Grass, is in Ms. Nathaniel's case quite authentic, and consistent as well with her other goals.
"The sky over Banderas, Texas, is sky," she informs us in one poem, "its true color...." And this is to say that in Texas things are exactly what they are --nothing more, nothing less-- and that is to say Ms. Nathaniel is dangerously close to betraying top secret Texas classified information. High treason.
Gordon HilgersIsabel Nathaniel, along with her husband, Bryan Wooley, will celebrate the publication of The Dominion of Lights at Paperbacks Plus on La Vista, Saturday, September 14 at 7:30pm. The verbally verbose (but editorially trimmed) Gordon Hilgers enjoys making his own myth with a bio that bills him as "an alcoholic, addict, co-dependent, compulsive overeater, sexually... extraterrestrials. He comes to us via Alpha Centauri." We edited out the abnormal parts of his bio.
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