Product Description

Winner of a "Discovery"/The Nation Award
Winner of the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry

Some Ether is one of the more remarkable debut collections of poetry to appear in America in recent memory. As Mark Doty has noted, "these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159534 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 64 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781555973032
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
A troubled mother with a drug problem who ultimately commits suicide, her menacing boyfriends, and a wayward father populateAand come to dominateAFlynn's debut. In these 48 free verse narratives and lyrics framing a plain American vernacular, memory can seem almost a compulsion: "I don't want// to remember her/ reaching up for a kiss, or the television// pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom." Though many of the poems' recollections are considerably starker than these, Flynn never becomes overly graphic or macabre with this potentially overwhelming material, skirting unbridled confessionalism or mawkish sentimentality through quick successions of imagery. The drawback in Flynn's approach, however, is that it limits the poems to dramatization and description, and provides little room for more complex characterizations or insights about the small-scale tragedies depicted. Charged figurative language does make its way in, however, sometimes touched with surrealism. Such dazzling surface effects sometimes come off as mannered and opportunistic, as in a stylized dramatic monologue of the mother handling her gun, "the hard O of its mouth/ made of waiting, each bullet/ & its soft hood of lead. Braced// solid against my thigh, I'd feed it/ with my free hand, my robe open// as if nursing, practicing/ my hour of lead, my letting go." Flynn occasionally departs from such dramas, but the dark tone and themes of loss and impermanence persist through recurrent references to disastersAplane crashes, shipwrecks, floodsAthat can't quite expand the range of the poems. This first collection nevertheless presents an earnest sounding out of painful losses, and an honest feeling out of survival and selfhood. (June)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This first collection is almost frightening in its honesty and reckless passion. Flynn writes tough, sad poetry that addresses a difficult childhood and a mother's suicide with unblinking faith that simply saying one's pain can tether it. There are droplets of bright, beautiful language throughout, as when "ghost stars convincingly stutter." Finally, one agrees with the author when he avows "infused with grace, by own voice/ floods the darkness."
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"[An] astonishing debut collection. In their roaming uneasiness, these poems enact the hypodermic activity of grief. We are guided by a stunning and solitary voice into lives that have spiritually and physically imploded. No one survives and still there is so much to be felt. Here is sorrow and madness reconciled to humanity."—Claudia Rankine

"Nick Flynn's subject—a mother's suicide, a son's peripatetic childhood—could not be more difficult to approach. If the poems stand 'close to tragedy,' as Flynn puts it, they also embody the act of survival: syntax and line conspire to pull us past the event, beyond the struggle. And yet the ghost of trauma lingers, ramifying beond the exquisitely understated endings of Flynn's poems. Even more powerful than the final line of 'My Mother Contemplating Her Gun'—'Tomorrow it will still be there'—is the silence that follows it, the knowledge that nothing lasts. These poems establish their emotional authority through their very movement—their wayward, whispering music. At once reckless and demure, outrageous and delicate, Some Ether promises nothing: it is a harrowing, beautiful book."—Judges' statement for the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry
-- Review

1967
Ago
And Then, And Then
Angelization
Bag Of Mice
The Captain Asks For A Show Of Hands
Cartoon Physics, Part 1
Cartoon Physics, Part 2
The Cellar A Machine Whirring Through The Night
Curse
Elsewhere, Mon Amour
Emptying Town
Father Outside
Five Hundred Years
Flashback
Flood
Fragment (found Inside My Mother)
Fugue
Glass Slipper
God Forgotten
Her Smoke (her Trick)
How Do You Know You're Missing Anything?
Man Dancing With A Paper Cup
Memento Mori
My Mother Contemplating Her Gun
No Map
Other Meaning
Peach
Prayer
Radio Thin Air
Residue
The Robot Moves!
Salt
Seven Fragments (found Inside My Father)
Soft Radio
Some Ether
Splenectomy
Stylite (fragment #10)
Sudden
Sunday
Trickology
Twenty-pound Stone
Two More Fragments
The Visible Woman
Wild With Dandelions & Roses
Worthless
You Ask How
You Moved Me Through Each Room
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Nick Flynn's haunting book is a study in suffering, a work of deep attention to the hellish passages of childhood memory, a child's inestimable pain. But these poems are more than testimony; in lyrics of ringing clarity and strange precision, Flynn conjures a will to survive, the buoyant motion toward love which is sometimes all that saves us. Some Ether resonates in the imagination long after the final poem; this is a startling, moving debut. -- Mark Doty

Nick Flynn's subjecta mother's suicide, a son's peripatetic childhoodcould not be more difficult to approach. If the poems stand close to tragedy, as Flynn puts it, they also embody the act of survival: syntax and line conspire to pull us past the event, beyond the struggle. And yet the ghost of trauma lingers, ramifying beyond the exquisitely understated endings of Flynn's poems. Even more powerful than the final line of My Mother Contemplating Her GunTomorrow it will still be thereis the silence that follows it, the knowledge that nothing lasts. These poems establish their emotional authority through their very movementtheir wayward, whispering music. At once reckless and demure, outrageous and delicate, Some Ether promises nothing: it is a harrowing, beautiful book. -- Judges statement for the 1999 PEN/ Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry

Customer Reviews

Powerful poems which reach beyond confession
When I first heard that Nick Flynn's book Some Ether was a collection of poems which dealt mostly which his mother's suicide, I decided I would probably avoid it. Yet another confessional poet writing about how awful his life has been just didn't appeal to me.

But then I looked at a copy. And immediately bought it. Because Flynn does something far more than just write about his childhood trauma -- he transforms this awful experience into a series of dry, deeply affecting meditations. It isn't unnecessarily depressing, and it certainly isn't self-pitying. These are poems which dig into the core of human experience and emotion.

Many of the poems are fragmentary or collage-like bursts of imagery, memory, reflection, dreams. A quick first reading lets you notice many beautiful or quirky lines ("I'm sick of God & his teaspoons"), but also makes you feel a bit like the reader of a collection of postcards and shopping lists sent from a psychiatric ward. It's a unique feeling. A closer reading, though, reveals the art. Reading the poems together, slowly, listening for the harmonies and discords, becomes an overwhelming experience. By the time you reach the last lines of the last poem -- "My fingers/ tangle your hair, trace/ your skull, your face so radiant// I can barely look into it." -- you have been through a full emotional journey, a sensual quest for meaning.

It's not a perfect collection, but it shouldn't be. Despite the high quality of their crafting, these poems are raw. There are gaps and crevices between them. Terrain such as this needs to be rough.

A Fine Debut
Having read Nick Flynn's poem "Bag of Mice" in a journal or online I couldn't wait to buy his first book. The poems in "Some Ether" deal with intense personal experiences, and I was afraid, the poems would suffer from this weight. They don't. The poems are beautiful in the sense that they are honest on the page-- by that I mean I know this is art, an artifical communication between body and soul yet the poems tell the truth of the moment they speak about. Does that make sense? I want other readers to know that these poems illustrate their world successfully because they don't wander away from it. This isn't a honesty that borders on confession or pleas for sympathy. This is a honesty that carefully draws out the painful-shocks of each event by making them into beautiful lines; lines that reimagine these moments because they were so powerfully felt that they need to be written down in order for the poems/art to continue.

in defense
It's a relatively easy thing to write from a safe and ironic distance about nothing; practically anyone can do it, as the MFA-mills have proven. It's much riskier (and potentially far more rewarding) to write with genuine feeling about the Big Bad, pounding on the door with its meat hook. Flynn isn't perfect--some of these poems jump the tracks at the crucial moment--but he ought to get points for having something difficult and meaningful to say, and mostly figuring out how to say it--unlike so many of the callow, academic-hearted poseurs that pretend to write poetry these days. We've forgotten, somehow, that mere cleverness is its own form of self-indulgence. Ironic detachment won't comfort us much in hard times; there are a few poems in this collection that might.