The yarrow writer, in Essential Tremor: Poems, indicates that she intends to deal with the mysteries of the body and carnal anguish.
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Essential tremor: poems
Barbara nickel | Caitlin Press (Halfmoon Bay, BC, 2021)
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$ 18 | 80pp.
According to the Mayo Clinic, an essential tremor is “a nervous system (neurological) disorder that causes involuntary and rhythmic tremors.” Naming her recently published collection of poems after this disorder, award-winning Yarrow poet Barbara Nickel notes that she intends to grapple with the mysteries of the body and carnal anguish.
As the poet recently told interviewer Rob Taylor on the Read Local BC website : “Over the years, my feelings for the body have intensified. For example, Essential Tremor contains two poems with that name: the first was written as a portrait / tribute to the care of my father-in-law by his wife, while the second was written years later for my husband, who had been diagnosed with a disease. Then the shaking moved as if it were from an earthquake that happened at a distance, to occur in the body of my own spouse, a major disruption within my own family. “
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Both the two Essential Tremor poems and Corona, a cycle of poems dealing with our collective torments in the ongoing pandemic, challenge the chaotic bodily experience with their rigor and formal polish.
Corona, for example, is written as a sonnet crown, a form that requires each sonnet in the sequence to use the final line of the sonnet that precedes it as its own opening line. This formal restraint, employed by many ambitious poets over the centuries, including John Donne, author of his own Crown, is demanding, but Nickel carries it out with authorial aplomb.
And the sonnet sequence is not the only part of this lapidary text that reflects Nickel’s penchant for formal experimentation. A series of poems inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, Body in a Mirror, is printed, like the Renaissance artist’s notebooks, in mirror format, with each line accompanied by its reflected image.
Reference-vancouversun.com