The Ada Poems by Cynthia ZarinAlfred A. Knopf, 2010

I haven’t yet read Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, though I own a copy, but I think that’s OK: I think it’s enough to read The Ada Poems informed just by the quotes from Nabokov that Zarin uses throughout, and by the flap copy, which explains that these poems are “inspired and inhabited by the title character of Nabokov’s novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, who was the lifelong love of her half brother, Van.”

I like the way Zarin’s language builds on itself, an associative vocabulary that grows within a given poem but also throughout the book. The very first poem, “Birch,” starts like this:

Bone-spur, stirrup of veins—white colt
a tree, sapling bone again, worn to a splinter (3)

and I like the multivalent feeling of it: as the poem continues (names carved in a tree-trunk: “a child’s hackwork, love plus love” (ibid.)) I have the sense of the birch as a colt and a tree, and the beloved as a colt and the birch: the thin skin of all of them, the curiosity about bones, veins, roots, what’s underneath. In other poems, too, the speaker and her beloved are horses: “we balk and shy,” the speaker says in “Regime,” and then later, in “Letter,” “for days we’ve/sped and shied” (5, 12). Other images that recur are decks of cards, winter-images (snow, fir trees), and summer ones (the beach, insects: a fly, dragonflies, damselflies).

Some poems are explicitly “dreamscapes,” but even those that aren’t have their own dream-logic of love and desire. Sometimes there’s pleasing wordplay, as in these lines from “Christmas I”: “Below, our old tortoise/paces the scorched carpet. On his armoured back/a sparkler shooting red and green. One letter/less, amour is his world” (7). Other times Zarin plays with sound while also giving us gorgeous images, like in this passage from “Fog in Holyoke”:

Four days after Christmas, fog skims the river—
thin skin a skein of yarn after yarn, knotted
with sleet, moth grey. Headlights on. (9)

Elsewhere the sky is “a snow globe where it kept snowing”; rain cascading down a window is “a no-legged race played out to nothing” (10, 24). “Electric Light,” possibly my favorite poem in the book, is about summer and light/heat/desire and dragonflies and memory and is full of great images (St. George and the dragonfly, instead of the dragon). It’s not freely available online, but if you’re affiliated with a library that has access to the Yale Review, you can read it here.