Jessica Van Orden

“Words, you were always / my friends. Now you confound / and defy me. We built…”

-Jean Nordhaus, “THE GRAMMAR OF GRIEF,” The Music of Being

In The Music of Being , Jean Nordhaus invites readers into monsterous pain time and again—World War II with not enough visas, and anniversaries spent with only yesterday’s ghosts—to consider the beauty that might be culled from resolution. Even the lonely ache of modernity is not spared, wherein “FACE TO FACE,” we stand separated not by line but "separate windows gazing out” into the manicured spaces of her coworkers as the speaker, drawing us in with a “glimpse / into the rooms beyond / … to a place that is hidden— … / the mystery /of another’s life” and yearning for connection (18). And this—connection—-becomes the very heart of each page. To read her lines is to be swept up in the emotion, to take on the losses she suffers and hear the music of her reconstruction.

There is nothing quite so isolating as loss—robbing us of hard-fought familiarities and the comfortable rhythms of our ‘ordinaries’. Worse still, grief steals not only the aspects we once cherished, but the very language we might have used to mourn them. For what words could adequately explain what weight emptiness now holds when the space used to be brimming with parent or partner, child or friend? Even home. Is there anger at those who we see holding  power, such as the “booming,” god-like “doctors” in “THE DOCTORS,” “pretending to be doctors” and tending to sickly beloveds who “lay [their] bodies down?” Certainly. Is there hindsight, such as the speaker’s realization in “ASHES,” who shares: “We scattered your ashes … / in so many landscapes you loved / you were finally nowhere,” a somber note made lighter by the following line, “Did they fly?” We hope.

And there lies the tension, because although words “confound and defy” sense with such loss, remains a driving need to attempt—to dredge up the indescribable and disperse the burden by sharing it—by finding another to hear us out, stumbling be damned, and say I understand: maybe not the experience but the emotion. Some turn to music, others art, but there is a reason poetry is a voice that lingers through time. With brilliant vulnerability and metered grace, Jean Nordhaus’ collection, The Music of Being, beautifully displays how poetry may become the breath of an emotion that has few words.

A tenured literature student, William Wordsworth’s name is never too far from my mind when I think of poetry, having shaped for me its foundation as being a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” In her newest work, Nordhaus not only possesses this practice but embodies it, grounding the reader in deeply personal terrains by allowing the emotion to be just that: overwhelming. There is no means of taming the intensity of her anxieties, sorrows, and anger, but instead, an invitation to our own spilling on the page. In one particular thread, woven with precise change and subtle growth across the work’s four sections, Nordhaus crafts an epic ballad: a love that endures staggering loss, and still scrapes enough strength for resolve.

In the first, OTHER VOICES, Nordhaus creates the context with a very communal tongue, wherein “WEDDING GHOSTS,” the speaker walks the isle “in multiple exposure,” and recites—“trembling”—”vows … the kept, the broken— / for this has happened / many times before” (13). These short lines demonstrate the deft handling of them by Nordhaus, for in conjuring the communal through metaphor, painting the ancestral dance of marriage, we lose none of the tension and narrative here in the immediate, with our speaker’s shown nerves: her “trembling” and insistence on those “broken” as well as kept” (13). The story is equal in presence to the emotion, and Nordhaus is sure to keep that through-line growing as we break away from the routine of it all and become grounded in the nature of our speakers one certainty: the one beside them: “And yet… / No heart has ever beat / like mine. Like yours. /No bodies ever stood /as we stand here… / to make such flagrant promises” (13). These lines shift grammatically with intent, employing past tense to juxtapose and foreshadowing the full circle of the grief waltz to come, and our speaker’s emotion steadies with the gift of coming through the experience to see the beauty in it now.

The narrative strength matching the emotive imagery is what stands stark throughout Nordhaus’s The Music of Being.. For the lines begin with emotion, but they do not end there. There is something learned and gained along the way that the speaker invites us into with each line, such as Nordhaus’ “ANNIVERSARY: A LARGE ENOUGH SPACE,” where the speaker assumes the space to speaker against the idea that “all the old stories” resolve the same and giving language to what their journey meant for her: “ It was … / a country / with a language only I speak. / It was a large enough space.” (50). Her work is breathtaking because it creates space. It takes what is loved of poetry, the force of the emotion , and makes it all the greater for the stillness of Nordhaus' execution. The way that her handling moves at once with burning immediacy only to be returned and made more full by with greater clarity and careful focus: what has been learned by the emotion—rediscovering language after loss—and thus transferred to the reader. It gives us a rhythm by which to traverse our own remarkable griefs to take hold of its joys.