A dazzling story of obsessive love emerges in Cynthia Zarin's luminous new book inspired and inhabited by the title character of Nabokov's novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, who was the lifelong love of her half-brother, Van.
These electric poems are set in a Nabokovian landscape of memory in which real places, people, and things-the exploration of the Hudson River, Edwardian London, sunflowers, Chekhov, Harlem, decks of cards, the death of Solzhenitsyn, morpho butterflies-collide with the speaker's own protean tale of desire and loss. With a string of brilliant contemporary sonnets as its spine, the book is a headlong display of mastery and sorrow: in the opening poem, "Birch," the poet writes "Abide with me, arrive / at its skinned branches, its arms pulled / from the sapling ... the birch all elbows, taking us in." But Zarin does not "Destroy and forget" as Nabokov's witty, tender Ada would have her do; rather, as she writes in "Fugue: Pilgrim Valley," "The past's / clear colors make the future dim, Lethe's / swale lined with willow twigs." Like all enduring love poetry, these poems are a gorgeous refusal to forget.
A riveting, high-stakes performance by one of our major poets, The Ada Poems extends the reach of American poetry.
