Fjords Reviews

Poetry
Hush
by Nikki Ummel

Belle Point Press
28 pages
ISBN 979-8-985896-52-7

There is a rare intimacy to the poems in Nikki Ummel’s chapbook, Hush. The poet takes the reader into some of the most vulnerable spaces possible, beginning with a double mastectomy and ending with the speaker’s first sexual experience. These are poems that are unafraid to deal with tragedy, but their true gift is an ability to make the people of the poems feel real and their heartbreak so close it seems like our own. Ummel is an empathetic poet and her tenderness for her subjects, whether children or the city of New Orleans, shines through in these poems.

The collection is divided into two parts. The first section deals largely with family and the specter of death hanging over them. A number of these poems are about children, but the poet never falls into easy sentimentality here. Rather, the reader gets children with all their natural strength and wild imagination.

In “Fantasy of Walking My Niece Home,” the speaker cares for her young niece while the child’s mother is “unreachable,” her “pink nails painted by kind hospice nurses.” The two walk by some trees and the niece begins to worry about the pine cones: “We have to put them back,/she says. Their mommy will miss them,” echoing the child’s own predicament. (p. 4). The poet gives us the terrible helplessness of being alone with a child, struggling to find the right words to explain hard truths: “some things can’t/come home.” (p. 5).

In perhaps the most searing poem of the collection, “And He Takes And He Takes And He Takes,” the threat of loss seems unshakeable. The poem introduces us to Elah, a child as old as her mother’s “father is dead.” He “withered & scabbed/on a worn futon cushion” while “Elah grew strong in the womb.” (p. 8). Even this, however, does not prepare us for the most devastating lines of the poem: “Elah is large for her age the x-ray/reveals a skeleton two years too old . . . Elah is five her skeleton is seven a cage fit to burst/her ribs bars of iron her bones of bronze.” (p. 9).

The second part of the book shifts the focus from the speaker’s relationship to her family to the speaker’s relationship with her city and her past. “After the Flood,” describes a typical New Orleans experience: evacuating ahead of a hurricane. The poem, however, balances the speaker’s worry with a self-deprecating humor, wondering what her descendants would make of the artifacts left to the storm: “our chipped/pho bowls, the blown glass/bong” along with the Fats Domino record “Still spinning.” (p. 12). Writing about the city seems to give the poet a certain liberty and the New Orleans poems can be inventive and playful, including a meditation on an abandoned weave and a poem told from the point of view of a fig tree.

The book closes with “Sarasota, 2010,” a poem whose gentleness belies the subject, losing one’s virginity in a barn: “He laid me down like a blanket/smoothed me over,/my edges tucked.” (p. 19). What is striking is how the lovers seem to disappear into the nature around them. All the action comes from the trees, the flowers, the horses, all having an almost visceral reaction to the lovemaking. Despite the strangeness of the setting, the retelling does not come off as traumatic. Rather, the ending seems completely joyful with nature supporting the lovers: “Afterwards . . . The lavender lifted. I saw I/saw all the trees of the field/clap their hands.” (p. 19).

Although the subject matter of Hush is serious, the darkness never feels overwhelming. This is a tribute to the obvious love Ummel has for her subjects and the way the poems highlight relationships and human connections as our saving grace. These are poems with enormous hearts and Hush is a brave, generous, and compassionate collection.