The poems in Some Ether, Nick Flynn's memorable debut collection, are wrought out of a haunted sensibility at once surreal and confessional. They recognize and respond to a personal experience--that of the poet--and as such versify Flynn's itinerant childhood, the estrangement of his father, and the suicide of his mother. Such weighty subject matter always runs the risk of overstated drama, but Flynn's sensitive poetic gestures are neither verbose nor grandiose. From the outset he shows us that he is a poet of fantastic understatement, as in the first poem, "Bag of Mice," here in its entirety:

I dreamt your suicide note was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag, & in the bag were six baby mice. The bag opened into darkness, smoldering from the top down. The mice, huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag across a shorn field. I stood over it & as the burning reached each carbon letter of what you'd written your voice released into the night like a song, & the mice grew wilder.

"Mice" is also notable for signaling the poet's stylistic predilections. Here we see Flynn launch the mnemonic strain of his mother's suicide bluntly, with all the irrational reality of a dream. The "bag of mice" gives us only a glimpse into the splendid cache of surreal images that populate the rest of the book. Moreover, the use of the ampersand in place of the conjunction is something of a stylistic reinforcement of structure. The ampersand suggests informality. It reinforces Flynn's delicate free-verse structures in concert with other informalities--linear incongruity, syntax patterned after the cadences of conversational speech. The resulting music is indeed colloquial in tone but not without emotional resonance and strange, haunting lyricism:

She opened herself like a time-lapsed rose. I thought
our bodies were mostly water

but there was so much blood. I rinsed the rags

in the sink & she whirlpooled
away, below my feet, filling sewers,

so much flowing from that moment, that
Atlantic.

("Memento Mori")

With a few poems Flynn assumes a ventriloquistic posture to render the voices of both his father and mother. (His mother's poems--a mere two in number--are italicized so that we know exactly who is speaking.) Such moments in this book's continuum of psychic trauma and psychic haunting strike me as marginally melodramatic, but that doesn't make them unnecessary. The mother's poems, in particular, get their impetus from the poet's uneasy resolve to substantiate the moment self-destruction becomes the only option. "I'd feed it / with my free hand," she says of her gun in "Fragment (found inside my mother)," "my robe open / as if nursing, practicing / my hour of lead, my letting go." Flynn thus delineates the mentality of a woman who has already surrendered herself to the dark forces.

Whereas the parental voices are minor, the primary, most substantive voice is, of course, that of the poet himself. His is an utterance of recollection, observation, and, to a certain extent, imagination. His voice is chillingly solitary, lodged in the vacuum of space, in the figurative sense, the inner space of the mind. Memories drift about like planets, whose landscapes Flynn draws out within horizons of surrealistic dimensions:

Years ago, alone in her room, my mother cut
             a hole in the air

& vanished into it. The report hung &
            deafened, followed closely by an over-

whelming silence, a ringing
            in the ears.

("Cartoon Physics, part 2")

The volume's title bespeaks his endeavor to place these memories in some large context, some ether. Ether, astronomers and physicists once believed, was the substance of all space; it was the medium through which light and electromagnetic waves traveled. Flynn executes his endeavor using a vision scientists have long ago abandoned, yet it is, finally, his redefined vision that prevails: ether as medium of not only memory but of thought and feeling. In this way Flynn potently universalizes what is essentially a very local, very personal human condition.

Some Ether may be considered surreal for its sources in the irrational world and confessional for the autobiographical import of its subject matter. It is, however, a mixture of both. In the end Flynn proves that he's a little more than a poet. He's an alchemist, who synthesizes the surreal and confessional elements into a poetic alloy of shimmering distinction.

Some Ether
by Nick Flynn

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