Intellect, Essences, and End Rhyme

Review by Wally Swist

The title of James B. Nicola’s recent collection of 88 poems references a phrase from the imminent American lyrical poet, Theodore Roethke, “My desire’s a wind trapped in a cave.” How eponymously apt it is, since it mirrors the poems that Nicola offers us—as scrolls unwound in the air. “Night Writer,” the opening poem, is reminiscent of Constantine Cavafy, when Nicola writes “There is/ a distinguishing feature to every love . . . it’s time to die again, and write.”

Nicola is a poet of essences, and a master of end rhyme.  A nature poem of some achievement but also an accomplished Ghazal, “A Single Rose,” exemplifies Nicola’s proficient sense of craft, “And baby’s breath, too, and a cooling fern, and wrap them in dull paper, like a passion./ (I’ll give a single rose, but it might burn.)”

However, it is Nicola’s incisive intelligence that readers will be rewarded with, time and again, as in the opening of “Torn,” when he writes: “If, in a billet-doux, you made a blunder/ but caught the gaffe in time, you could reject/ it, once upon a time, sliding it under/ your blotter to revise.”

Yet it is the poignance Nicola evinces, in “veil,” that the natural world and human emotion are wedded in the piquancy of image that he truly excels, “Feeling every breeze/ on your moistened face—Being:/ stung by sweet thorns,” which also reminds us, again, of Cavafy, both in emotive element but also in aesthetic value.

This is a book of poetic heft, a much larger book than is usually published by Finishing Line Press, of Georgetown, Kentucky, in 2017, that is perhaps best exhibited in the poem “Weight,” when Nicola writes, expansively, even hauntingly, and with such an adept touch: “the weight of me, my body, brought/ to light by the desire/ to reach the higher, brighter place/ just within my sight;/ to freely bask, and breathe, and walk,/ and ease the heft, with light.”  Writing such as this is reminiscent of Walt Whitman, and resonates in what are, indeed, some of this poet’s better lines.

In James B. Nicola’s Natural Tendencies, published by Cervena Barva Press, out of Somerville, Massachusetts, we “can still taste the wild and green aroma” of his landscapes—both of the interior and the natural world.

His robust imaginative intelligence is on display in poems such as “After the ice storm,” where he can’t keep from hearing the branches of the willows tinkling in the yards “cogitating/ and coming up like invisible confetti.”

In “The Succulent,” Nicola adeptly uses rhyme to portray a prickly vegetation in a barren landscape: “To what secret it owes/ its leathern flower/ and lasting power,/ no one really knows.”  The poem “Each tree is a now,” one of the more ontological poems in the collection, exhibits true depth in the lines: “the tree stands upright/ like you and me/ deepest parts hidden in a cold, moist dark.”

Nicola’s intellect is prone to keep itself honed in these poems, as in the Lorine Niedecker-esque poem, “sansevierra’s,” whose entirety is compressed into three crystalline lines: “sansevierra’s/ blade accreting crustiness/ tended, keeps quiet.” And in “The Case of Stars,” reminiscent of Theodore Roethke, Nicola’s touch is lyrical and his tone is adept, in some of the finest lines in the collection, “The stars don’t only twinkle, writhe/ and wink, but with our mindless, blithe/ emergencies, will breathe, as if, alive.”

Moreover, as in the poem, “Thoreau,” these poems address “This wonderment,/ This universe” in an age when green space is vanishing and the climate is warming. In response to this, although Nicola intimates “The Center may not Hold,” there is a solace and a resonance to be found in the poems found in Natural Tendencies—demonstrated in their adept craft and uniquely adroit voice.

Wind in the Cave and Natural Tendencies
James B. Nicola
Finishing Line Press