Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Reviews

On Donna Stonecipher's The Ruins of Nostalgia 

reviewed by Jane Yager | August 27, 2024

Donna Stonecipher’s latest collection, The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a cycle of 64 prose poems on the theme of nostalgia, set largely in Berlin and Seattle, in which most of the poems end with the refrain “the ruins of nostalgia.”  Both archaeological and mesmeric, the book excavates strata of nostalgic objects while conjuring the specific longings that make up nostalgia. In this book, nostalgia is an indulgence, an ailment, and a peculiar music. It is perilous and deeply human.

The first poem hypnotically intones: “Courtyard opened out into courtyard opened out into courtyard.” This dreamlike rhythm belies the two prosaic forces the poem details. In Berlin, where Stonecipher has lived for the past two decades, an art gallery is closing; in Seattle, her childhood home, a bookstore is going out of business. “At this bookstore, courtyard after courtyard had opened in her mind,” the speaker recalls, but in this poem, cultural institutions are dying of rising rents in both her home cities. 

Stonecipher’s speaker bristles at the truism “One door closes, another opens,” as invoked to dismiss any sense of loss by placing these changes within an eternal symmetry of “the market.” On the terrain of The Ruins of Nostalgia, nothing exists in any such balance or proportion. Nostalgic objects pile up and overflow; the layers of the past shift underfoot, making for unstable ground; and buildings groan beneath structural problems. “She was reluctant to admit she felt nostalgic for symmetry,” the speaker confesses amidst the asymmetry of “an unjust world trashed with lopsided stuff.” The reluctance here to admit a longing for a past aesthetic is reflective of the poet’s stance throughout the book: fully aware of nostalgia’s dangers, yet just as unable to resist its lures as the rest of us.  

Nostalgia turns space into time and time into space. Like an infinitely repeating series of doors in a painting, it generates an illusion of space, entrancing and self-referential. Stonecipher wonders, “Do we all crack out of our lives as we live on, trying to understand what we have lived through in retrospect as spatial?” If so, we need linear time to turn our pasts into the stuff of nostalgia: “the pasts we have cracked out of can’t be idealized if we can’t turn around and look at them getting smaller and smaller in the distance behind us.”

This idealizing of the past makes nostalgia more pleasurable, but also more deceptive, than memory or history. “Remembering is one of the few political acts both radical and tedious,” the speaker declares, whereas nostalgia—neither radical nor tedious—feels cozy, is nestled into. It has a treacherous lightness; nostalgia “felt weightless, a tiny black-lacquered snuffbox inlaid with golden scenes, beautiful and detrimental, that we could carry with us effortlessly from room to room and even out into the world waiting to infect us with feeling.” In contrast, the labor of mourning a lost loved one is a “roomful of heavy cardboard boxes of regret. A roomful of heavy cardboard boxes of grief.” 

A Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, coined the term “nostalgia” in 1688. It initially described “an illness with a prescribed cure: opium, leeches, a view of the sufferer’s home.” Stonecipher treats nostalgia as a circular affliction, insatiable in its cycle of healing and infecting: “the only cure for nostalgia is nostalgia. There is an illness informing the illness, and that illness must be mined to extract the exquisitely atavistic elixir.” Nostalgia itself is opium and leech. 

Beyond both languishing in nostalgia and critiquing it, Stonecipher also reveals it as something more than an ailment: a rhythm, one that prose poetry as a genre is uniquely capable of rendering. Like the first-person plural “we” voice that narrates many of these pieces, and like prose poetry itself, nostalgia is both individual and collective—we all feel longing, algia, but differ in our particular lost home, nostos. One piece opens in a blunt prose register: “We did not know anyone who had grown up in our neighborhood who could now afford to live in our neighborhood.” Remembering the changes the neighborhood’s houses had undergone at the hand of gentrification, it soars into the lyrical: “They gained second stories, third stories, picture windows and skylights, hot tubs and balconies, gained terraces and gardens, lost yards, lost rhododendrons, gained sedge and lavender, lost juniper bushes, gained butterfly bushes and chard.” The stark prose of capital’s effects on the city reverberates against the incantatory spell of poetry. Each piece expresses the poetic voice of individual interiority, the music of its accretions and repetitions, and at the same time engages in a prose narrative’s confrontation with the concerns of the collective. 

Stonecipher’s knowledge of the German language courses below the surface of the poems as interlinguistic word play. Himmel, both sky and heaven, is at play when she teases a description of the blue sky in a Caspar David Friedrich painting into a meditation on utopia as a “cracked fragile blue heavenly state.” As sky becomes heaven and heaven becomes utopia, space slides into time. The book is littered with the detritus of past utopian visions, reminders that the striving for an ideal place always ends in ruin, and: “It’s no wonder the Spaniards never found El Dorado, since it is always located behind us.” The word prägen—used to describe both the inventing of words and the minting of currency—haunts her riff on money “Nostalgia coins sentiment into durable objects…. The profiles on gold coins, we could say, coined the obliquity of greed.” Capital turns feelings and objects into one another and gives them all an unsettling immortality. That nostalgic objects endure is a recurrent theme in the book. When the houses of her childhood neighborhood in Seattle are torn down to make way for more profitable new builds, “the unprofitable houses did not disappear: they accumulated like strata of sedimented geologic time in the minds of those who would never be free of them.” Nothing ever really goes away. And in one piece, the speaker calls museums “repositories of our collective marcescence,” encapsulating the artificial longevity in which museum objects are suspended, and its kinship with nostalgia.

Most poignant of the German concepts flickering through The Ruins of Nostalgia is versunkene Welt, a term for a lost place or time that calls it a literal sunken world, often used in reference to the GDR. Several of the poems deal with its nostalgic objects that linger in Berlin. But the motif of submersion extends beyond this context: one past era has “drowned like a city sacrificed to a dam.” Nostalgia operates as a “dysfunctional gift economy whose items stop circulating when recollections are collected into infinitesimal trunks that glitter once and then are sunk to the bottom of the mind for safekeeping.” Circulating in an economy yet sunk deep within the individual’s mind, its objects impossible to recover but never truly gone, nostalgia thrums with a beguiling tension. By harnessing the musicality of this tension, Stonecipher has written an immensely rich and powerful work.

At several points, the poet references Goethe’s phrase, Stay, thou art so fair: the fatal words that Faust utters to express the impossible wish for a fleeting moment to linger, thereby losing his wager with the devil. Faust speaks the words to a moment, but Stonecipher’s voice speaks them to a city. The concept of nostalgia is mapped onto the spatial experience of her two home cities. Berlin and Seattle become poetic case studies in nostalgia, and through them we see that in this book, nostalgia is many things: It is a malady, as Johannes Hofer first postulated in the seventeenth century. It is a mirage, one that entraps nostalgists and leaves them “falling over and over through the hourglass reversed into perpetuity.” And however false nostalgia’s promises, the losses that make it appealing—the death of a loved one, the vanishing of a childhood home, the closing of a bookstore—are very real. Amidst all these different notions of nostalgia and its ruinations, one thing that remains constant is the speaker’s stance, deeply empathetic to the reasons we feel nostalgia, yet unsparing in its admonition: Make no mistake, the fair moment will not linger.

Bio:

Jane Yager is a Berlin-based writer and translator from California. Her criticism has appeared in publications including the Times Literary Supplement and the Paris Review Daily and her creative work in Narratively, The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. You can find her at janeyager.com.