Nome legale: Nurkse, Dennis
Data di nascita: 1949-10-13
Sesso: male
Luogo di nascita: New Jersey, USA
Istruzione: Harvard University
Relazioni: Nurkse, Ragnar (father)
Premi e riconoscimenti: American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature ∙ 2009)
Whiting Writers' Award (1990)
Breve biografia: Dennis Nurkse was born on December 13, 1949, in New Jersey, the son of Estonian economist Ragnar Nurkse. He received his BA from Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, and worked as a factory worker throughout the 1970s. He has also worked as a construction worker, grant writer, human rights representative to the United Nations, street musician, kindergarten teacher, translator, bartender, and harpsichord builder, among others.

Nurkse is the author of ten poetry collections, including, most recently, A Night in Brooklyn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), The Border Kingdom (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), and Burnt Island (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

In his review of A Night in Brooklyn, poet Philip Levine writes: “He possesses the ability to employ the language of our American streets, shops, bars, factories, and any place else and construct truly lyrical poems, sometimes of love, sometimes of anger.”

Nurkse’s honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Whiting Foundation, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was appointed Brooklyn poet laureate in 1996 and served in the position until 2001. Nurkse has taught poetry at Brooklyn College, The New School, Rikers Island Correctional Facility, Rutgers University, and University of Southern Maine. He currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

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Recensioni

A Night in Brooklyn: Poems di D. Nurkse

What a difference three years makes in poetry education and reader taste. Originally this collection rated three stars in my first read three years ago. Re-reading it after exposing myself to poetry, I find this collection fascinating. Nurkse captures that deep home feeling we have for the neighborhood where we grew up. We may not thought much of it at the time but memory is a funny thing and we look back fondly on days gone by. Not all the poems look back. Some are generational and reflect changes and the present. A very good collection pushing for five stars and I am at a loss to explain my original rating of three stars.

This book was read for pleasure and not review.… (altro)

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evil_cyclist | 1 altra recensione | Mar 16, 2020 |

A Night in Brooklyn: Poems di D. Nurkse

With A Night in Brooklyn, the mysteriously initialled D. Nurkse has produced a fine, vibrant collection, poignant without being mawkish, expressive yet austere, and—within the constraints of its fairly conventional structure—sneakily subversive. The volume, its author’s tenth, is the work of a hyper-observant loner, attuned to the rhythms of the city, half in love with the past, half in love with the future, sketched in lines that skew just this side of modernist opacity. In Nurkse’s hands, standard-issue free verse, broken into stanzas of irregular length, seldom running over a page or two in length, is energized by sudden leaps of poetic imagination rendered pleasingly concrete, with “daylight in our cupped hands” or “August inching / sideways through the blinds.” Images of eyes, reflection, vision—the poet “entered your level eyes like a minnow”; “the rain / simmered in the dog’s huge eyes”—recur with haunting regularity, becoming over time a fully realized motif redolent of perception, doubleness, mirroring. The voice is conversational without being banal, effortlessly evocative, and graced with a touch of the metaphysical, a feel for the “shining absent presence.” Many of the poems trace, with rueful accuracy, the locked-together waltz of romantic attraction and dissolution, where “we made love and each thrust / carried us deeper into the past,” before “we grow old [and] it ends in chaos.”

To be sure, the Brooklyn that Nurkse conjures up, with its “domino players / hunched over folding tables” and boys “taking engines apart / on stoops” is not the Brooklyn of artisanal markets and organic diaper creams, but rather the older, grittier, working-class city that lies, Pompeii-like, under strata of memory and demographics. These are missives from precincts (Canarsie, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Flatbush) and occupations (factory worker, housepainter, bartender, truck driver) that rarely figure in Brooklyn’s chic post-millennial landscape. But, A Night in Brooklyn is too engaging to be considered a mere dispatch; in these poems, the quest to be “united in a radiance / that will not fade at dawn” becomes universal. From THE L MAGAZINE, August 1, 2012.… (altro)

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MikeLindgren51 | 1 altra recensione | Aug 7, 2018 |

The Border Kingdom di D. Nurkse

Nurkse has an unusual blend of the highly personal and the public in his poems. They are highly wrought, quiet, sinuous, emotionally open, politically aware, serious and enchanted. I highly recommend this poet.

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pascalepetit | Jun 7, 2009 |

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