Next to Nothing records the years following the death of a beloved child in 2001. Though bereft of belief in the poetic outcome compared to the apocalypse of the loss itself (one sense of the title), the fidelity of these poems to the “heartscapes” of grief constitutes, nonetheless, a work of genuine honouring – spare, delicate, and deeply moving.
Of the collection in general, Agee has written:
“In addition to individual poems and several sequences, Next to Nothing includes a section entitled ‘Heartscapes’, which consists of 59 ‘micro-poems’, as I call them. Many of these are extremely short; most were written during the very bleak and soul-sick year of 2003; and the whole section (with one poem per page) will take no more than thirty minutes to read, and indeed can be read with ease by any general intelligent reader, whatever their familiarity with or experience of poetry. Swiftness of effect was, in fact, part of the intention and fidelity; the challenge here as throughout the book was to record true and deep ‘heart-feeling’ (as opposed to the ‘feeling’ of sensibility, apperception, historical moment, etc.) – that most delicate of poetic material, owing to the swiftness of emotion itself. For once, I think I can say that these poems wrote themselves, in the sense of my being a quite passive amanuensis caught up in pain rather than any sort of instigator – drawing on the habit of technique belonging to what had become a previous life, whilst suddenly also bereft of belief in the poetic outcome compared to the apocalypse of the loss itself – that is to say, the textual as ‘next to nothing’, in several distinct senses, like Matisse’s sparest line-drawings in a sea of blank space ...”
Table of Contents:
- At Bethlehem Nursery
- A Bouquet from Miriam
- Heaney at Struga
- Depths
- Sebald
- Next to Nothing
- Attic Grace
- The Tulip Tree
- Life
- The Apocalypse of Fishes
- The August Dream
- Mirage
- The Science of Lampshades
- Heartscapes
- Heartlands
- 1 Observatory, Empire State Building
- 2 The Mall
- 3 Amish Quilt, Kalona
- 4 Limantour Beach, Point Reyes
- 5 Boston Common
- Alpine Interlude
- Sea-campion
- The Zebra Finches
- Tea-herb
- Crolly Woods
- Circumpolar
- In the Adriatic
- Night Ferry
- August Ghost
- Keepsakes
- Zephyr
- Near Dubrovnik
- Sea-cloud
- Darwinian Scrabble
- Talisman
- Nightsky
- In the Hammock
- Love
- The Bench
- Sea Snail
- [Sic]
- Knin Eclogue
- In Prvo Selo
- "The Sarajevo Music-box"
- After Hay-on-Wye
- Coda
About the Author :
Chris Agee was born in 1956 in San Francisco and grew up in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island. He attended Harvard University and since 1979 has lived in Ireland. He is the author of two books of poems, In the New Hampshire Woods (The Dedalus Press, 1992) and First Light (The Dedalus Press, 2003). He edits Irish Pages, a journal of contemporary writing based at The Linen Hall Library, Belfast. He reviews for The Irish Times and has recently completed a new collection of poems, Next to Nothing (Salt, 2009), which will be published in Britain, Ireland and the United States in January 2009.
Review :
It is a profound and exceptionally moving book. I haven’t read anything so powerful for a long time. I was left with a sense of both the fragility and the huge importance of the here and now, as well as with an expanded sense of poetry’s capacity.”
Next to love, grief is the great enabler of poems. In many ways grief is more powerful than love, whether in fiction or poetry. Love, especially if it is a happy collaboration between adults, excludes us from its golden circle even as readers, whereas grief, with its sense of crisis and abandonment, ignites our sense of humanity and calls us to become a part of its urgent business. In this, his latest collection of poems, the American born, Belfast-based poet, Chris Agee, has created a compelling, grief-stricken narrative.
