A Review of Nicky Beer's The Diminishing House by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum 

Beer, Nicky. The Diminishing House. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010.

Nicky Beer’s debut collection of poems, The Diminishing House is dedicated to her father who died from a brain tumor early in her childhood.  Like the collection’s opening line, “Every child ought to have a dead uncle,” The Diminishing House takes an unusual approach to its central subject matter that allows her to focus on the language and the real world affects of her father’s death rather than the emotional ones.  Beer utilizes extended metaphor, for example, in “My Father as a Small Submarine” in which “The hospital room at night / is the bottom of the ocean…” and her vivid imagination in “A Short Documentary of my Father Running Backwards” regarding her father’s first seizure:

I want to believe
that during your last
beach road jog
the seizure
drew you taut;
that you staggered
a few feet in reverse
and threw out
your arms
to the asphalt’s firmament
of mica dust and quartz…

Beer’s experiences with the physical and metaphysical nature of her father’s death results in a collection that manages to write from various stages of grief without a shred of sentimentality.  Even though we encounter the father, his declining health, and the aftermath of his passing, these poems find other little pieces of fascination to focus on.  The Diminishing House is anchored by a number of eulogies to human anatomy.  Here are the opening lines of “Floating Rib:”

 The permanent elsewhere of fathers—
 my hand goes to my side as I read.
 A lie thrusts out into viscera, gestures
 to untouchable bone.

Likewise, “Note on the Xiphoid Process” addresses the “lower tip / of the sternum;” “Variation on the Philthrum” “the hollow that divides the upper lip;” “Genes” “the red beads encircling / the throat of Rembrandt’s young woman.”

Beer’s virtuosity of form is a delight as well.  Poems like “LMNO” and “Provenance” hug the left margin in loose iambic.  “Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions” is a list of questions followed by their answers.  “Variations” and “Erosion” make use of sections.  “Ouroboros” employs lengthy, dropped, and indented lines.  “Mako” utilizes tercets.  And “Cubital Fossa” emulates via form the object of its definition, “the triangular anatomical region / anterior to the elbow joint”:

 Pack mule for packages,
 cradler of gunbutts,
 blackfly cockpit,
 cuffcruncher,
 nonelbow,
 sweat tarn,
 gula,
 bight.

Finally, there are also three prose poems in The Diminishing House: “His Mistress,” the title poem, and “Patellae Apocrpypha.” 

Play, clearly, drives Beer most in this debut, and it is nice to see.  The result is a collection of poems that face down the death of one’s progenitor, while undressing Beer’s lifelong struggle with the reality of her father’s death.  Rarely does a young poet come along with the willingness to tackle tragedy with an emotional consciousness while successfully eschewing self indulgence or pity.  Beer has proven it can be done.

-This review was first published by New Letters