Poems by Nathan Lipps, reviewed by Dakotah Jennifer
BUILT AROUND THE FIRE (Stephen F. Austin State University Press)

“Mourning doves linger
beneath the basket of seeds
waiting, discussing applications of empathy
or economics, what poverty means”

Miles to go before I sleep in Frost’s poem is like an echo in the woods. It is not just about a snowy wood in the evening, it evokes exhaustion, desperation, peace, and pain. I’ve never been one for nature poems, mostly because I feel there are better ways to say, we have miles to go. But sometimes, there is no other way. My favorite works are authoritative, striking, nuanced but to the point: Baldwin and Kincaid, Hagood and Vanasco. Many writers write through pain, confusion, and misunderstanding. I do not consider myself one of those—I most often find myself writing what I know, what I’ve always known. Infrequently, I may bump up against something confusing or unknown, but I am in awe of those who can write into, and out of, things they do not understand. But there is something striking and restless in the unknown—in attempting to say something that is both undeniable and unsayable. There is a beauty and terror in something that is pressing and unspecified. This is what Nathan Lipp’s Build Around the Fire brings forth in me.

Although it is squarely within the genre of nature poetry, and could even be considered deeper into the genre than the more social-justice-centric work, the book is an expertly done illumination of a struggling landscape juxtaposed with a failing humanity. Lipps’ descriptions are both light and gripping, and they say more than what meets the eye. Though the poems are beautiful and captivating, they also wish for us to lean in closer, listen in, and understand what we have done — the beauty and danger of nature coming toward us. We see this in the conclusion—the peace and danger of it: “Peering out into darkness / for sunrise. / Knowing / it will blind. / Too much. / Hallelujah. / Even the seeds.” Lipps asks both for the pain of living and the beauty of it—all with nature at the center. Each poem swirls around the reader or floats away in lackadaisical hope—each line begs for the next.

In three parts, Nathan Lipps’ Built Around the Fire is a walk through a forest that will soon disappear. Human fault, human nature, or nature’s end? Lipps asks, with each scathing, vivid poem, where are we going and how do we escape our own human flaws? Each poem dances through simple prose and lingering questions, and often, we are left with a sort of loss—the grief of living and being alive, still.

In Part One, Lipps delivers sweeping imagery, scenes, and snapshots, and softened struggles– these mimic the natural landscape, rolling hills, and farmlands. We are brought through nature, both dry and dusty, and naturally plentiful. Still, there is danger lurking within. A lesson we are yet to learn but already know, a whisper of something the author understands but we have not yet reached. To be alive, to take and give to nature, as we siphon we also reap what is left for us. Scarcity, like a wide-open dirt road, lingers in these pages. A wintery desert.

As in many of the poems in Part One, in “What About Ambition, Its Hunger?”, Lipps throws nature up against a stark background—willing us to dive into it’s meaning. He writes,

“The apple not sliced and sugared
into pie, but frozen in winter
on the branch and pressed into wine.
The promise of more
finally terrifying. Finally too much.”

We see the solitary apple, and feel time rushing through it, the love lost, the sweet opportunity of pie, wasted. The “promise of more”–of a more delicious outcome—is too much pressure. The apple is left to ferment and die. We see these complex and potent meanings, nuanced and expansive, throughout. The fear of great things also remains a prominent theme—one that leads, always, to wasted time.

Part Two brings us more into the human experience—marriage, love– in a backdrop of the exquisite natural world: lakes, a winding road up a hill, trees and ditches, chickens in the backyard. Like a still life, Lipps’ poems move before us, in scenes or loops, leaving us with more feeling than moral—more an emotional timbre than a lesson. The imagery’s prominence brings the poems to life—a short scene, a quiet forest, a family gathering—the poems teleport us somewhere else, and for a moment, we live there, watching. In this way, reading is like breathing– or living itself. The mundane turns into the tragedy, the passage of time turns into an excruciating slippage.

In the first poem of Part Two, Lipps writes,

“Rain last night.
Today sun.
And always the clock.”

Always, the poems echo through the piece, they accumulate into a murky kind of lost feeling, of being lost in the constant push and wanderlust of life. Yesterday it was raining, today it is better, sunny, but still, the clock ticks no matter what. The passage of time looms over the work like a specter, both daunting and comforting.

In Part Three, Lipps’ poems get denser and more elaborate. Spring blooms and riots. Present throughout all of the sections is a subtle theme of scarcity—of humanity draining nature of its resources. In Part Three, “Dipping For Osmeridae, Upper Peninsula Michigan 1988,” Lipps evokes this, writing:

“Later they’ll dump the buckets into a truck
and go back for another wading out deeper
Dipping the net again and again
Until it becomes fruitless

And the trucks depart
And the embers cool
Until some wind
makes a god of them.”

The “again and again,” evokes both a habitual act and a simultaneous act— the fruitlessness was fated from the moment they returned to take more and more. Lipps’ critique of humanity’s overindulgence is searing. Yet it’s not an indictment exactly—he seemingly sees everything, including the recklessness of humanity, as an ecosystem, just one that is destined to crumble. But the tone is a dichotomous one—a depressive sadness, apathy, defeat—mixed with a peaceful sort of gratitude or joy: the joy of existence.

In his first poem, “Controlled Burn, ” Lipps is setting this up for this—why “Build Around the Fire?” when there are so few mentions of fire itself.

“They have set fire
To a thousand acres
Of very real forest
To prevent future fires”

Ultimately, Lipps’ title, “Build Around the Fire,” echos back over and over again this stealing and rebuilding humanity does—burning down the forest in order to prevent the future burning. And then building up their own destruction into the cycle. Building something around the mess they’ve made, and going on living without understanding the destruction done.

The sections themselves feel like time passing, the breakdown of people, relationships, the body, the self. Though there are no big folly or crashing crescendo, it seems as if time itself is the tragedy—both a loss and the core of all. Struggle, resilience, living anyway, seems to be a core of this collection, but told through small quiet moments in the yard or a bird landing on a branch. It is our thinking, our deconstruction, that leads to meaning in these poems—Lipps simply gives us the tools. In reading “Build Around the Fire,” we are, as Lipps writes, “beginning to understand the need to understand something.”

Dakotah Jennifer is a 23-year-old Black writer currently working on her MFA at Columbia University. Her work has been featured in The Texas Review, Popsugar, Protean Magazine, Laurel Moon, Across the Margin, HerStry, and The Pinch Journal. Dakotah has attended top workshops like Juniper and Bread Loaf, and has won several awards including Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).

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