Nectarine

In his second collection, Nectarine, Chad Campbell stands at the threshold of hushed worlds in highly visual and sonically elegant poems. The first of the book’s three parts delivers darkly impressionistic scenes: “the half- // skinned auks look back over the isle / at what the fire cast: the outline of a man / boiling them.” The natural and rural environments here are largely silent, cold, and wet, and in their gloominess they offer brooding terrain for Campbell’s subtly surreal images, which find their way via carefully constructed rhythms, with slant-rhymed sonnets falling over severe enjambments.

One of the central themes in this collection is death, and Campbell makes purposeful effort to remain adjacent to it: appearing next to dying animals, in the hospital room of a terminally ill man, and ferried by a Charon-like locksmith through a boat tunnel. The collection also includes direct elegies, like this one: “The world is a poor custodian. / But the work is not against / forgetting. I remember you.” Campbell’s impressionistic style gradually becomes more discursive as his attentiveness to death and other quiet realms morphs into concentrated meditations on visual art. In the lavish ekphrastic poem “Ashmolean Rings,” the poet scrutinizes images locked in time: “The bishop sits mute with his fork. / The hunter holds his lamp so still / the paint around his hand is cracked.”

Elegy, art, and even nature function here as forms of memory, which, for Campbell, are all frozen like the titular nectarines. Past loved ones and painted figures alike are suspended throughout these poems, out of which Campbell seems to be constructing containers for what has been lost, and for what might still remain: “Death is repetition / and in death you repeat.”