{"id":10488,"date":"2019-06-20T21:51:10","date_gmt":"2019-06-20T20:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10488"},"modified":"2019-06-21T09:23:18","modified_gmt":"2019-06-21T08:23:18","slug":"nina-bogen-thousandfold-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10488","title":{"rendered":"Nina Bogin | <em><strong>Thousandfold<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Nina Bogin | <em>Thousandfold<\/em> | Carcanet: \u00a39.99<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i64.tinypic.com\/6zsy2v.jpg\" width=\"220\" align=\"left\" style=\"margin-right: 10px\"><\/p>\n<p>There is a lot of snow towards the start of <em>Thousandfold<\/em>, Nina Bogin\u2019s fourth collection.  And even when there isn\u2019t snow, there\u2019s snow, as in the beginning of \u2018The Dream\u2019 part 1, of Bogin\u2019s sequence, \u2018Visit to a Friend\u2019, \u2018I take a snow shovel, a laundry rack and my older daughter, \/ and on foot we struggle along the beach to reach the town. \/ There\u2019s no snow, but the sand makes walking difficult \/ and it takes a long time to cross the cove.\u2019  And this tension between presence and absence permeates <em>Thousandfold<\/em>. When the narrator of \u2018The Bees\u2019 witnesses a swarm passing her by, she later comments \u2018as if I too \/ were part of the air \/\/ and would arrive\/ and disappear \/\/ with no more claim \/ on the passage of time \/ than a dust-mote \/ or a drifting seed\u2019.  And the poem which follows, \u2018Saintpaulia Ballerina\u2019 begins, \u2018Because we can\u2019t \/ write this poem \/ together, you and I, \/ who didn\u2019t like \/ each other, \/ I must write it \/ for you \u2013 who \/ will never read it.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Snow, and presence and absence suggest a kind of quiet, but almost gelid, tension inhabiting Bogin\u2019s writing; a description that might portray these poems in a negative light, but actually that is not the case.  One of the things that snow does is to dampen the sound of the landscape and that is sometimes the case here. As we can see from the quotations above, Bogin\u2019s writing is always sparse and unadorned and that quietness of style releases the work of the poems; work which is to present the world lightly and quietly but with a fierce focus.  That focus is not only present in the \u2018Saintpaulia Ballerina\u2019 quotation, which fixes an enmity in the need to preserve it in writing.  But the focus is also in the sense of the narrator\u2019s sense of their own self in the presence of the swarm of bees, which passes her by, ignores her, even. <\/p>\n<p>The sense of absence in presence occurs towards the end of the volume in Bogin\u2019s poignant, moving poems about the descent of her husband into dementia.  And here the metaphor of snow applies to the dementia which affects Bogin\u2019s relation with her husband, settling over his brain and showing a personality in relief but not in detail.  As Bogin puts it in a poem entitled, \u2018Dementia\u2019, \u2018Now your gaze is veiled, \/ you wear someone else\u2019s smile.\u2019  Although, underneath that veiling, things can be awry and even spikey; the poem continues, \u2018Your voice wobbles, \/ anxious, edgy. \/ You\u2019re fidgety, crotchety. \/\/ Where\u2019s my flashlight, \/ my shoe horn, my book?\u2019  When the husband asks after his carte vitale, and carte d\u2019identit\u00e9, his wife concedes that, \u2018Yes, husband, your identity \/ has been misplaced, \/ mishandled, misshapen, \/\/ slowly crumbling \/ like your old ski boots\u2019.  Again, what is noticeable here is the quiet, unadorned precision that Bogin uses to show these disintegrations.  <\/p>\n<p>If snow is a recurring metaphor in this book, another notion which animates this book (pun intended) is Bogin\u2019s empathy with animals.  This empathy forms a bridge with the dementia of her husband in the poem \u2018The House Shrew\u2019.  In this poem, a tiny house shrew creeps inside the house, and is immediately territorial, aggressive and, of all things, loud, \u2018bared its little row of teeth. \/ It wouldn\u2019t be coaxed \/ or appeased.\u2019  Of course, \u2018The door was open \/ but it wouldn\u2019t leave. \/ There was no reason for it to flee \/\/ because the shrew was me.\u2019  Another such poem is, \u2018Evenings with Mika\u2019, Mika being the family cat. The poem depicts the husband and wife sitting quietly together, with the cat on the wife\u2019s lap.  It ends, \u2018Is she truly a cat? \/ Yes, and a little bit more, \/ but that\u2019s a quirk \/\/ only cat lovers will admit. \/ You think I exaggerate. \/ I\u2019m sure you\u2019re right. \/ You doze in your armchair. \/ I stroke our cat.\u2019 There is interaction between the couple and gentle disagreement.  But, at the end, it is the narrator who is in the interaction with something which belongs to the couple, whereas the husband is asleep. Such poems allow Bogin not only to place her own emotions in the disintegrating marriage. They also allow her to create an imaginative bridge between depictions of the marriage from the inside and a broader, more open sense of how these emotions might be represented. <\/p>\n<p><strong>by Ian Pople<\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | Carcanet: \u00a39.99 There is a lot of snow towards the start of Thousandfold, Nina Bogin\u2019s fourth collection. And even when there isn\u2019t snow, there\u2019s snow, as in the beginning of \u2018The Dream\u2019 part 1, of Bogin\u2019s sequence, \u2018Visit to a Friend\u2019, \u2018I take a snow shovel, a laundry rack and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10488\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Nina Bogin | Thousandfold | Carcanet: \u00a39.99 There is a lot of snow towards the start of Thousandfold, Nina Bogin\u2019s fourth collection. 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