Feel Free

by Nick Laird

Overview

Shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize

“Nick Laird’s dazzling poems arrive with a kind of revolutionary candor; a truth-telling that’s political, existential, and above all, emotional.… Feel Free is essential poetry.”—Terrance Hayes

Feel Free, the fourth collection from acclaimed poet Nick Laird, effortlessly marries the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird’s forebears Heaney, MacNeice, and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention, and wit, Laird explores the patterns of freedom and constraint—the family, the impress of history, the body itself—and how we might transcend them. Always daring, always renewing, Feel Free is Laird’s most remarkable work to date.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324002758
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	172 KB

About the Author

Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, critic, and the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. His many honors include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The poem “Up Late” was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Laird taught for ten years in New York City and currently lives in London and Ireland.

Table of Contents

i

Glitch 5

To the Woman at the United Airlines Check-in Desk at Newark 6

Fathers 8

The Good Son 9

Feel Free 12

Grenfell 16

Parenthesis 18

Silk Cut 20

Manners 21

Autocomplete 23

The Vehicle and the Tenor 24

ii

Parable of the Arrow 29

The Good Son 31

Coppa Italia 34

User 35

On Not Having Children 36

Watermelon Seed 37

La Méditerranée 38

Chronos 40

XY 41

The Cartoons 42

Team Me 44

Incantation 45

iii

Cinna the Poet 49

The Folding 55

New York Elasticity 59

Getting Out the White Vote 61

The Good Son 62

Temple of Last Resort 64

Crunch 65

Horizontal Fall 69

Extra Life 70

To His Soul 75

Notes 77

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/01/2019

Acclaimed poet Laird (To a Fault) writes poems in which language acts as an exercise of seeing and probing, yearning to shape reality and ideas. The poet extracts his themes by cutting across history and reality. Race, refugees, immigrants, politics, national identity, family, love, and life in the city are all tangled up through richly textured poems. There is no stylistic uniformity in this collection as the poet employs a variety of forms to engage his subjects. In one haunting piece, he lyrically depicts in a lyrical mode a relationship between a father and a son in an everyday descriptive scene but permeated with dread and piercing grief; the cumulative effect is dazzling: "we are going home, waiting/ at the turn of the traffic, when I find/ I have to stop my hand from taking his." Laird claims the common as the fertile land of poetry spotting gleams in its many layers. He is questioning and investigating the human experience, tirelessly reaching for its pulsed substance. One can see the brilliant usage of the matter-of-fact glints and clichés, which, in most cases, is reminiscent of work by John Ashbery. VERDICT Laird writes remarkable poems, self-reflective and socially drenched. Those here are rich instances of awakening and discovery. Highly recommended.—Sadiq Alkoriji, Broward Cty. Lib. Syst., FL

Library Journal

★ 07/15/2019

In Laird’s precise, energetic fourth collection (after Go Giants), his chief poetic gift—an intimate voice of mixed vernaculars that gets inside the reader’s head—is on full display. Whether bedside with his children, walking “a scrubby acre at Creggandevesky,” watching a sea bass that eyes him from a plate, or navigating traffic en route to his dying mother in hospice, Laird’s line has musical integrity and strength. Infusing the intensity of childhood with the sorrow of losing a parent, Laird explores this timeless subject in “The Folding,” in which he folds paper snowflakes with his children. Here, childhood and parenthood are presented as the same thing, reversed. Before the poem concludes with a gorgeously described snowy day, it observes “that infinite complexity’s composed/ by simple rules.” Similarly, another standout poem in the collection, “The Vehicle and the Tenor,” rises to the manic threshold of grief, the devastating reality of his mother’s dying, “beyond metaphor.” Laird offers the reader a subtle, lasting meditation exploring the family as it was, as it is, or as it could be. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"[Feel Free] shows this exceptionally gifted poet extending what is by now a real range."

Books of the Year 2018 - Times Literary Supplement - Paul Muldoon

"Nick Laird's acute eye and shades of meaning make these poems a gift to read."

Guardian

"The highlights of the book are love poems and city poems for the Information Age: the poet's situations and relationships—as a father, a son, a husband—are sized up and filtered through different kinds of brilliantly manipulated language…Feel Free [is] Laird's best book yet."

Irish Times

"Reading Feel Free, I feel myself in the presence of a true master, a poet courageous and capable enough to sing loss and shame, humor and praise as if it is all part of the very same song."

Tracy K. Smith