Why Speak? : Poems
Why Speak? (W.W. Norton) was published in hardcover (2007) and paperback (2008). Poems in this collection have appeared in Grand Street, The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Open City, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Western Humanities Review, Witness, The Yale Review, and the Everyman anthology Poems of New York.
New poems of mine have appeared or are forthcoming in The Harvard Review, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, The Common, The Yale Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and other periodicals and websites, including the “Poem a Day” program from the Academy of American Poets.
“We have an impertinent name—sense memory—for the narrative device whereby this new poet rings changes on what has happened, not to him but to the houses, trees, landscapes to which he once belonged. Such memory is Nathaniel Bellows’s wonderful trust in the moments (hours they must have been) which his senses alone made sense of the losses, the failures most of us disguise by abstractions. Such confidence makes the poems ‘come true’; here he stands ‘peering beyond / the islands at that outer rind of land above the horizon—thin and fine / as the layer peeled from our bodies when the sun torments our skin/.’ The solution, for Bellows, demonstrably comes from flesh to assuage spirit’s alienation; whence his unchallengeable voice, new among us but veteran for poetry.”
— Richard Howard
"[Nathaniel Bellows's] poems tell stories, but the book’s power depends on the slow accumulation of an inner world: “Who knows what / to make of that moment?” he asks in the title poem...The stories are gripping...."
— The New York Times Book Review
"It should come as no surprise after reading this debut collection that Bellows is an artist who works in various media, as committed to the visual arts and music as he is to the written word. His poems are intensely visual, and the long, daring lines enjamb with an intricate music. It is the stories, though, that make Bellows's work special. In an age more given to the lyric voice, his poetry is unapologetically narrative, offering richly drawn accounts of moments in time. Even a series of five ekphrases, after illustrations by Howard Pyle, are full of his own people, places, and stories. Numerous other paintings are enlisted for these poems, as are the music of the symphony, memories of childhood piano lessons, and the curious birdsong of the city: "at once their convoy lifted/and I was surrounded, all around me they exploded,/open and closed/like books." A smart and powerful debut; recommended for contemporary American poetry collections."
— Library Journal
“Bellows, who has a novelist’s ear for sturdy, rhythmic lines, writes with wide-eyed candor of both the marvelous and the grotesque. …Carefully stitched together, sometimes with visible effort, these poems begin to ask if the past can ever be stable, since we are perpetually reconstituting our memories from the evidence at hand, be it art or music or the natural world….For Bellows, the activity of memory is a bit like playing the piano blindfolded, as the speaker does in “Music Lessons”: “The notes, like swarms of bees I would pluck / from the air, replacing each in its comb, / my fingers thin and careful, piecing together the hive.” Something is always missing—a fact, an explanation, a person—so the search for past similarities and present echoes has no choice but to forage a way around the inexplicable.”
— Boston Review
"Nathaniel Bellows's first collection of poetry is a vivid book which seems sadly beautiful throughout."
— Bookslut
"Nathaniel Bellows has no other voice but his...it is existential thought where all consciousness is connected, and language makes the relationship with the world...the book's strategy is wonderful. A cause for silence is made by the title poem, and yet what we want more than anything is to hear his voice."
— The Montserrat Review