The Shore contains five poems, all of them a bit longer than average--ten to twenty pages. Part of the length is accounted for by Nealon's use of "one-line stanzas" (as I think he calls them in one of the poems), single lines standing all by themselves as a sort of moment of their own in a thought process--"Down into matter, flux, the green world" or "The whole taut net of the social order." This generates a fair amount of white space--some pages may have only ten or twelve lines--even allowing for that, though, the poems do feel like "long poems," taking their time, unfolding a thought, crossing it with another, then wait-a-minute-what-about-this, then touching on something from a lifetime of reading, then connecting an old memory.
The effect reminded me of the soliloquies of Henry VI or Richard II in Shakespeare's history plays. Nealon's poems have the same process of opening up of a thought, but are also similarly erudite (helps to know who Ascanius and Hocquenghem are, for example), lyrical ("a hint of lemon in the eucalyptus"), self-aware, willing to probe old wounds, also willing to test out new ideas--"branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain," as Keats says.
When Henry and Richard give their major statements, they are both insiders and outsiders--royal, but deposed--abject and commanding the heights at the very same time. Nealon's exploration of queerness (throughout, but especially in "You Surround Me"), whiteness ("White Meadows") and the perils of our late capitalist moment (throughout, but especially "The Shore" and "Last Glimpse") have that self-aware clarity that Henry and Richard have when things have gone completely to hell, and might even persuade one that the insight gained is worth the cost of things having gone to hell.
Nealon also offers up a line I feel like commenting on at greater length--but that can gets its own post.
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