Bad River Road Follows Tradition

Debra Nystrom's Skillful Autobiographical Poetry

May 12, 2009

Debra Nystom's new book of poetry, her third, has the power to convince readers that her life growing up in South Dakota has universal significance.

It's fair to say that overtly autobiographical poetry-the kind where readers learn the details of a poet's life the way they would the background of a character in a novel-is on the decline. Stepping into its place is a postmodern, or simply chic, method, sometimes stimulating, sometimes stale, of unearthing raw, ungrounded responses to life in general, and composing them in what Jason Guriel, in a recent review in Poetry magazine, called "a vague, blurry shorthand."

And so Debra Nystrom's third book Bad River Road, which is sharply rooted in her home landscape of South Dakota, and brims with specific details of her early family life, her parents' trials of adulthood and old age, as well as her brother's life in prison, and his battle to stay clean and sober, feels like an enduring piece of Americana stretching back to the late 1950s and early '60s, and the autobiographical poems of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton.

Saying no to Sentimentality

The reasons for the decline of this kind of poetry are tough to sort out, but perhaps one clue involves the sheer difficulty of the autobiographical poet's task, which the experienced and savvy Nystrom tackles with seeming ease. She consistently skirts sentimentality by envisioning her memories as if through a veil of stoicism.

In "Waiting It Out," for instance, about her mother's last days in a hospital, she artfully arranges the bare details of her mother's morphine-induced recollections without commenting on them or embellishing them, as if fulfilling the philosopher David Hume's empiricist plea to commit everything to flames that's illusion, and not a matter of fact. That these recollections came after the morphine created the illusion that her son, Nystrom's brother, is her dead twin brother, as we learn at the beginning of the poem, adds layers of poignancy and complexity to this idea.

More Than one Method

Nystrom knows, however, that less dramatic autobiographical material needs fine-tuned imaginative input from her. In poems such as "Bicycling To School," and "Skinny-Dipping After Work In the Drive-In," the straightforward titles give way to surprising, carefully sculpted visions of a blissful unity that's as grounded in concrete situations as it is aloft on metaphysical heights.

Staying Alive

Given the obvious impact Nystrom's family life had on her as an individual, it's doubtful that she's as concerned with keeping a certain poetic tradition alive as she is with working through her emotions through language. But "Bad River Road" is a striking reminder of poetry's potential power to convince us that the unique fingerprints of our seemingly isolated experiences have universal significance.

The copyright of the article Bad River Road Follows Tradition in American Poetry is owned by Douglas Nordfors. Permission to republish Bad River Road Follows Tradition in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.