Letters to Jimbo
The poems in Letters to Jimbo, reflecting the tentative, tender movements of a woman's heart from inured grief into an invitation for new intimacy after the age of seventy, are delicious in their ache, their Eros, their humility and their longing. With each poem, Nancy Owen Nelson adds new lines to love after seventy - a subject not often enough written about with such softened, sensualized, explorative candor.
The poems feel youthful, intense, secretive, excitable and uncertain, even born at the edge of an involuntary willingness to try again for intimacy. In the opening poem of the book, the narrator boldly inquires, "Handyman Jimbo] are you the one who fixes broken hearts?" The steady self-disclosure in this evocative sequence of love poems never once falls into the banal. Instead, the reader becomes invited into the emerging magnitude of what is actually at play - the unfreezing and the reopening of a heart to the liberation of desire, so that it might heal. Although the poet references love experience after seventy, what the reader experiences is the sensual, youthful, eternalized lushness of the falling in love with someone again: its colors, its tastes, its freedom, its febrile excitement after "an evening of touching." And yet, perhaps the deepest delight in this collection is that the poems themselves - in how they emerge and how they are sequenced - seem to be paced and presented in the same careful, tentative, vulnerable and expressive way that both these depicted would-be lovers exhibit in their personal dance together, just as they themselves experience it.
-Ken Meisel, author, The Light Most Glad of All and Chasing Names on Nameless Water
In Jimbo, Nancy Owen Nelson offers an unforced naturalness that opens an intimate space for the reader to view. Touch is tantamount to sexual pleasure - home repairs of both house and skin. In these letters to Jimbo, we encounter an ordinary person who has come for home repairs. But he also is renewal, according to the Alabama poet of extraordinary tenderness, who writes of her home ground as sacred. As his repairing hands work on her living space, one can imagine, as I did, not Jimbo as much as Henry Miller, the great American writer mostly unread today, who's writing of his many loves as if building some great colosseum of the soul.
-Russell Thorburn, author, And the Heart Will Not Quicken
"That those moments could last," the speaker in Letters to Jimbo says early on in this tender, later life love sequence. Nancy Owen Nelson crafts her deeply personal and delicately erotic "Letters to Jimbo" for an audience of one, but she invites readers to stay close, to feel the loving moments, and the moments of fear and anguish. There is much doubt and fear here - but love keeps making itself known. A seesaw of emotions is the grounding for their relationship. There is a dark history here that Nelson skillfully weaves into the fabric of Jimbo's story, and by implication their story, and the speaker empathizes with that darkness - but at her own peril. These poems, these letters, chronicle a relationship that may not abide but has had a profound impact on the poet.
-Jeanie Thompson, author, The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller
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