98 Poetry for Students
achieves it because the poet herself is consciously
trying to reach readers and non-readers alike, any-
one who can make the time to hear a good story.
Living “in a way that lets us find” the poems
suggests that people, as poets or simply as citizens
of this world, must live a life committed to other
people and all of creation. This is another one of
Shihab Nye’s themes, and one that speaks volumes
for the soul of this poet. In “Kindness,” she reminds
her readers that
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness...
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth...
(Words under the Words)
Kindness emanates from Naomi Shihab Nye’s
work. The five volumes of her work reveal a deep
understanding of our weaknesses, our humanity, as
the stories that she creates define her ties to a peo-
ple who endow her with an appreciation for her-
itage and a strong sense of what she has lost and
what she has gained as she defines her own place
in the world.
Source:Ibis Gomez-Vega, “The Art of Telling Stories in
the Poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye,” in MELUS, Vol. 26,
No. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 245–52.Bert Almon
In the following review of Words under the
Words, Shihab Nye’s collection of poetry, and
Never in a Hurry, her collection of essays, Almon
asserts that “readers will find similar satisfactions
in both books: memorable language, lively imagi-
nation, and deep human sympathies.”Naomi Shihab Nye’s selected poems, Words
under the Words,represents her first three books:
Different Ways to Pray, Hugging the Jukebox(a
National Poetry Series selection for 1982), and Yel-
low Glove.Nye is one of the best poets of her gen-
eration, a fact underlined by her prominence in two
recent PBS series on poetry: The Language of Life
and The United States of Poetry.Readers can finda very full selection of her work in Words Under
the Words.
The most popular poetic mode of our time, the
free verse lyric rooted in personal experience, has
come in for criticism because it is so often prac-
ticed without commitment. This poet is always vig-
ilant: the rhythms are sharp, the eye is keen. She
excels at the unexpected and brilliant detail that un-
derwrites the poetic vision. The image of a skillet
appears in three of the poems, and that seems typ-
ical of Nye’s perceptions: a notoriously solid and
practical object, brought into poetry. Her vision
takes in the ordinary and extraordinary: there is a
poem here about sending a beloved cat in the cargo
hold of a plane, and others that focus with clarity
and anguish on the intifada.Nye has a Palestinian-
born father, and she explores her loyalties with
great tact, revealing the rich humanity of people
who are often demonized. She has other loyalties:
to the American side of her family, to the forma-
tive scenes of her childhood, and to the pressures
and dramas of the people in her largely Mexican-
American neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas.
Like William Stafford, whose poems she admires,
she is a writer with allegiances. Allegiances, not
prejudices or animosities.
For all her interest in other people, one theme
that runs through the poems is the formation of the
self and the subtleties of its development. Here she
shares a great deal with William Stafford. For both
poets, “world” is a favorite term, and they avoid
narcissism by stressing the ways that the mind of
the individual makes its way in the world: being
nurtured or injured, reaching out in sympathy or
closing in a little to protect itself. Nye and Stafford
both favor reaching out, but they dramatize a whole
range of responses. They invite us to understand
our own stories by telling theirs with memorable
details. One of the best poems, “White Silk,” takes
off from a Zen meditation—“Try to be a piece of
white silk.” After a stunning series of dream im-
ages of silk, we find the poet in a general store, ex-
amining a bolt of white silk with smooth brown
lines at the creases: we return to the world of iron
skillets, but feel extended by the imaginative jour-
ney. The title of her collection, Words Under the
Words,expresses a confidence in ultimate mean-
ingfulness of our descriptions of reality. If we lis-
ten, we can hear the inner meaning.
The essays in Never in a Hurryshare much
with the poetry. They have the openness to expe-
rience and the flexibility of development that we
value in the essay form. The variety of the book is
one of its pleasures: the essays range from longKindness