Anyone
Milton's God
Where I-95 meets The Pike,
a ponderous thunderhead flowered –
stewed a minute, then flipped
like a flash card, tattered
edges crinkling in, linings so dark
with excessive bright
that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,
the onlooker couldn't decide
until the end, or even then,
what was revealed and what had been hidden.
Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klug's Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenes – natural and domestic, political and religious – across America's East and Midwest. The book's title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgil's Aeneid). Uniquely among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: "To stand sometime / outside my faith... or keep waiting / to be claimed in it". Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of "what it is to feel: / moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose".
Contents:
Acknowledgments
Work
Conjugations
Milton's God
Letter of Introduction, Samuel Palmer to His Patron
Thinking
The Choice
Dusk in Jasper County
Home
Neighbors
To Egnatius, Who Won't Stop Smiling
Jon's Jog
Advent
Parade
A Message
Lullaby on Election Eve
Lost Seasons
Shifts
In Calico Rock, Arkansas
Novitiate
Gift
Three Days
Octonaire on the World's Vanity and Inconstancy
Sound from Sound
Sacred Harp Sing, Bethel Primitive Baptist
Anyone
Dare
Errand
Predestination
The Truly Fucked
Petition
The Gladiator
Twenty-Something
Trail
True Love
Squirrels
Mercy
Observer
About the Author
Nate Klug is the author of "Rude Woods", a book-length adaptation of Virgil's Eclogues. A UCC-Congregationalist minister, he has served churches in North Guilford, Connecticut, and Grinnell, Iowa.
Reviews
"I can't get Nate Klug's spare, clear poems out of my head, and thank God for that. I would say that he is at the beginning of a great career, but that sells this book short, which seems to me to already have elements of greatness. 'Anyone' interested in poetry, regardless of camp or creed, is going to want to own this book" – Christian Wiman, author of "Once in the West and Every Riven Thing"
"Nate Klug's 'Anyone' is a searching book. Its voice is quiet, vibrant, musical, and steadily, unusually, egoless. A hundred years from now someone – perhaps anyone – who wanted to know what it is like to perceive and feel, think and believe, in our times could find the answer in these poems, so touched by the past, so alert to the world in and around them. Like George Herbert's "virtue", they shine both in the day and in the night" – Susan Stewart, author of "Columbarium and The Open Studio: Essays in Art and Aesthetics"
"Klug's poems are like containers catching rain, ping by ping, they have perfect sound patterns made by the formation of a water they create themselves falling in. The Merton-Zukovsky epigraph at the start – 'In the whole that is unnecessary, every small thing becomes necessary' – perfectly captures the background for such finely tuned poems, as necessary as rain" – Fanny Howe, author of "Second Childhood"
