Michael Young on "Cicada"

In a poem entitled "Shells," Mark Nickels says, "I've been praying without knowing it." In this we catch an intimation of his poetry's incantatory power and synthesizing force. However, what we cannot guess from this quote is the massive grandeur that comes through even his shortest of poems. With a sweep like a Mahler symphony, it is hard to quote his work in brief, although, at times, his poems have beautifully quotable lines, such as, "The oranges are a refinement of everything the dirt knows."

The mystical undercurrent of his work comes to us under the peculiar banner of the confessional. Unlike other poets whose mystical explorations are distanced by scholarship or stylization, or are simply a cultural impulse, Nickels' interest is from natural affinity, which means from the most personal point of view. It is this fusion of a confessional voice with a natural mystical affinity that I find unique to his poetry. It is as if self-examination discovered the universal at its center. For instance, he opens the poem "Ludlow Café," with the line, "A voluptuary of unknowing, I huddle/in a vast wool coat." I can think of no other poet who conjures such an image; it's as if the anonymously written mystical text "The Cloud of Unknowing" had actually been authored by Oscar Wilde. A witty tack to take, but also quite profound.

Consequently, the speakers of Nickels' enchanting poems shift and change, as in his poem "Cicada" where the speaker, in one section, is in the present, and in another section, is in the year 1669 untying a woman's bodice. Or, time itself shifts as in "Astor Place Opera House Riot" or "Spiral Maneuver" where the poet tells us, . . . last Tuesday rhymes with the same day in 1124, because the moment is adjacent, contiguous to the other on a clear, winding helix of days.
Here we find another theme peculiar to Nickels-at least, peculiar for a modern poet-for in spite of his obvious fascination for the multiplicity of things, he does not share the modern faith in the fragmentary.

In "Waterfall Effect," he tells us, "A poem is a record of the way the world rhymes with itself."
Certainly in a world which the poet George Oppen called, "The shipwreck of the singular" we need to hear the message that, in fact, the world rhymes with itself, and we have a record of that rhyming in Nickels' poetry: musical, mystical and integral.