Why Speak?
Nathaniel Bellows
W.W.Norton
In a poem about remembrance of loss sparked by looking at a photograph of a child’s bedroom in which hangs a painting of a whale, Nathaniel Bellows writes, “I see how the artist made it all up – I know the need,/ the penchant for invention.” In his debut collection of poems, Why Speak?, Bellows is interested in a kind of inventive truth-telling which demystifies childhood memory and reveals a coming of age story in rural New England. It is inventive in the sense that Bellows pulls from memory, an ornament he constructs and details into poems which employ multiple narratives, and engage with the natural world and its particulars while remaining remarkably lucid.
These are the poems of a deeply introspective poet. They are willing to risk sentimentality in their curiosity about the emotive nature of human life, whether as an adolescent growing up in the country, or a young writer living in New York. Yet for Bellows these interests are approached with a certain kind of delicate restraint. In “The Good Shepherd,” a poem which appears early in the book, a young boy learns about impermanence after seeing his mother’s car drive away from the family home.
…as my hand would rest on the cool chrome of her car each
time she drove out the driveway. I would chase her. It was a game,
a practicing, as the car slid out from under my hand the way coins slide
hesitantly from one palm to the other, or into the mouth of a jar, or
as the dart’s departure from the well-intentioned grip takes its leave
as the fair does, suddenly, without fair warning, each lynchpin pulled,
flatbeds packed, hauling onto the highway.
Bellows’s language is not cloaked in abstraction. He says exactly what he means, even as he moves in and out of metaphor. And it is his precision and ability to locate the emotional core of a moment, and his choosing to further lean into it, that allow the quiet revelations we come to find and appreciate as readers.
Why Speak? is comprised of four sections, taking us from the masculine New England pastoral of his childhood to the museums of the cities he later visits—Boston and New York. In looking at the paintings of Howard Pyle, Bellows begins to identify the personal in the socio-historical. It is precisely through the act of looking—a kind of mantra throughout the book, whether what is being looked at is a mare giving birth or a piece of furniture—that Bellows comes to realize that to speak in an attempt to grasp or pin down meaning is unnecessary. Through observation he discovers that our articulations of the world inevitably fail. They are flawed and incomplete,
...Like flowers: bloom,
wither…or birds: soar, shot from the sky. Don’t you see? Who knows what
to make of that moment? Our hands…we don’t plan these things.
We don’t need the meaning. So why speak about it? Why speak?
Yet Bellows has spoken. He has written a beautiful book in praise of the redemptive nature of silence and perception. And although he never claims to, it seems he has understood much about the landscapes he inhabited—landscapes which continue to haunt us long after we leave the poems.
- Alex Dimitrov