On Purpose

Poetry of Resentment

Nick Laird is the patron poet of bachelorism. This at first may seem counterintuitive, as he is the husband of bestselling literary novelist Zadie Smith. But upon reading either of his collections, one quickly gets a sense of man's inherent desire to be on his own. "Go home. I haven't slept alone / in weeks and need to reach across / the sheets to find not warmth but loss," Laird writes in "Aubade," a poem from his 2006 début, To a Fault. The title of that book would thus suggest that we do things, especially in relationships, that reveal our flaws, that make us contemptible to significant others. Even at his most tender, Laird is doubtful and cynical: "do you think we could find a way back to an evening / when holding each other will not be about balance / and all of the tunes are inside us and wordless?"

On Purpose is no different; if anything it's a maturing of the artist as a young man with unmitigated passion. Like an Elizabethan drama, the collection is loosely split into five parts, but no overarching theme holds these poems together -- although Laird cleverly entitles one section "from The Art of War," twelve poems riffing off Sun-Tzu's classic that reverberate this lament of the loss of bachelorism, manifest a festering resentment toward a lover, and reveal the loneliness we will always experience even when we let those close to us even closer. There's competition in "Attack by Fire": "You read it first but I loved it best." There's misunderstanding in "Posture of Army": "I sketched our crest / and family motto: // ENEMIES DEFINE YOU / BETTER / THAN YOUR FRIENDS...You thought I meant / the opposite, / had changed the words / by accident." And there's hatred in "Waging War": "This evening at dinner your very existence / was enough to disprove Darwin. / I outhitlered Hitler."

Laird's voices may not be able to deal with proximity of the personal, but they certainly can handle the nuances of language, allusion, and description. His eye for detail and ear for diction are both acute and defamiliarizing: "Your cigarette, neglected, / unthreads air / to ash. The study's walls are // strung with hoops of light / thrown by a glass / of water." The common becomes strikingly uncommon, opposite to what we normally think or say, making the everyday stimulating to our reading sensibilities. Here is a poet with the patience to let a moment linger, to let words seep into the readers' imaginations and let readers ruminate on such salient designs.

In "Number 8," Laird makes his strongest allusion to his literary father and fellow Northern Irishman, Seamus Heaney. As in Heaney's mystical bog poems or his unforgettable work "Digging," in "Number 8" we plunge into the earth and uncover a hitherto forgotten world, a world that continues without us, that somehow will never change no matter how history progresses. Discussing the contradiction of Antarctica -- one of these forgotten yet enduring territories, the coldest and yet the driest place on earth -- the speaker states, "for fire is excitable, can catch and take / like all diseases, including, for these // purposes, sadness, number 8." In the context of the poem, 8 is sadness, the eighth pattern of evil (one more than the seven deadly sins). But 8 -- being the symbol for ad infinitum, a lemniscate standing upright -- also suggests the powerful image from Vladimir Nabokov's great poem/analysis novel Pale Fire: "In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps / But really envied nothing -- save perhaps / The miracle of a lemniscate left / Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft / Bicycle tires." The lemniscate, the infinity symbol, has no beginning and no end, and both Nabokov and Laird are interested in this -- Nabokov being fascinated ("deft"), Laird being sickened ("diseases") by it.

On Purpose reveals a depth and range that confirms the talent shown in Nick Laird's earlier work, bringing him further into literary conversations with master stylists and thinkers of past and present. His sense of internal and near rhyme, combined with his in-your-face imagery and subject matter, make him a voice that refuses to be silenced, a voice of the imperative.

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