Warscapes Introduces Readers to Nathaniel Farrell

Nathaniel Farrell's newest full-length book is a book-length poem! Newcomer appeared this year from Ugly Duckling Presse. At Warscapes, poetry editor Noam Scheindlin provides a insightful introduction to Farrell's work with an excerpt from the poem below. Check it out!

Nathaniel Farrell’s book-length poem, Newcomer (Ugly Duckling, 2014), from which these excerpts originate, could be read as a genealogy of the political self. Threading himself through the pastoral landscapes that have for background an unnamed and intemporal war, the likewise unnamed speaker seems to traverse the boundary between symbol and thing, as he travels between the things that cannot be said and the things that get said instead of them. Denied the origin of the narrator’s wanderings, we never do get to parse between war as a contingent and destructive force, and war as the experience of being born in a world in which we must die. Instead, it is the impossibility of making the distinction that gives Newcomer its force.

The speaker seems to accept this interregnum between the thing and the symbol that grows from out of it. Often, in Newcomer, experience seems to just elude the speaker, as he attempts to tell it, leaving us with the sense not that something that could have been told was not lived enough to be able to tell it. Sometimes the poems are infused with the smell of the earth, and with the warmth of light, but with a lacuna nonetheless in the experience of it: The same sun shines in a land that’s not mine anymore / But I can’t see it shining. I see it going home instead / To loved ones…(62). It is at moments like these that the speaker appeals to an imagined reader to see it, who then becomes the real reader, recruited now, to traverse with the author the distance between thing and symbol, between being in oneself and seeing oneself, and between civic blindness and civic duty. [...]

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