Patty Nash, Walden Pond

 

The wheel of history is being turned

Terns skim the wetlands which are evaded by the tiller

The tiller is the lever which turns the wheel

The wheel levers the tiller and is attached to the rudder

The rudder maneuvers the ship like a shark fin

Fine establishment you’ve got here

Her? Oh, she’s my sister (“Lübeck”)

The full-length debut by Berlin, Germany-based American poet Patty Nash is WaldenPond (Colombia MO: Third Hand Books, 2024), holding as her title echoes of references to both American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s infamous Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) as well as the celebrated pond itself, which rests in Concord, Massachusetts. Can such a sleek and sharp poetry debut survive underneath such cultural weight? As the back cover offers: “In Walden Pond, Nash probes and plays with the first-person pronoun, investigating the construction of national identities and the way nations in turn construct the identities of individuals.”

There is an absolute sharpness to her poems, her restless, thoughtful meditations, her cutthroat lines, such as the short poem “Economy,” the first in the final (and title) section, as she writes: “I’d like to perfect my technique, / Which I know is wanting // Though in order to do that, I’d need fresh / Hands on my sternum and my chest [.]” She writes a solidity of meaning and purpose that allows for a fluidity of lyric, almost reminiscent of the work of the late Saskatchewan poet John Newlove. Her poems shape an American terrain, offering perspectives from multiple points across a wide map, writing her “first-person pronoun” across fractures, fragments and sediment. “Don’t laugh,” she writes, in the poem “Worth Home,” “The order propped / Itself up in choir chairs / And didn’t wear underwear, and didn’t speak / And today we are meant / To be charmed by this and are dutiful.”

Set in four sections—“LÜBECK,” “PRECURSOR,” “THE PATRICIANS” and “WALDEN POND”—the poems in Walden Pond offer collage in a really precise through-line, leaping from moment to small moment with fascinating coherence. She carves out delicate lines through deep cuts of restless imagery. “Ah, summer.” she writes, as part of the title poem, “Life / is what happens / when you / remember May / 2012 in pure / dread and fear. / Life is also what / happens when / you say ‘I simply / cannot deal’ and / defer, tuck / spaghetti / bolognese in / napkins, I’m truly / excellent at that.”