on Nick Laird

Fuckety fuck

Nick Laird publishes a new collection at the rate of around two a decade: To a Fault (2005), On Purpose (2007), Go Giants (2015), Feel Free (2018). The titles follow a pattern of clipped, ambiguous syntax. What should we make of Up Late?

The ‘late’ is clear. The book opens with the poem ‘Grief’, and proceeds on that theme. The title poem, which takes up the entire second section, is a prolonged elegy for Laird’s late father. Even when not working directly in elegy Laird’s approach is inflected with mourning. In ‘The Outing’ he finds a magpie pecking at a dead rabbit on the lawn and reflects that he will return to a house ‘a little different; harder, sharper / and where my children will not look at me’. In ‘Pac Man’ his daughter lets go of a balloon and he finds it ‘Odd to watch the realisation take, up close, / like this, the central lesson of one-way loss’. Elsewhere he simply seems depressed; sitting on a bench in the square he finds ‘Everything already is fraying at the edges if not completely gone. Everyone / is mourned in turn…’.

The collection is bookended, with Laird declaring in the final poem ‘I put away my grief’. As in his titles, we should be wary of taking that pronouncement at face value. While Laird might be proposing his collection as a therapeutic, he may just as well be shooing his sorrow away, or locking it up for later: everywhere the poems suggest that loss is inchoate and inescapable, with mourning ...