The Chariton Review
Vol. 3, no.1,
Spring, 1977
By Jim Thomas
The Nonny Poems, by David Kherdian. New York: Macmillan, 1974. $4.95, 52pp.
Any Day of Your Life, by David Kherdian. New York: The Overlook Press, 1975, $5.95, 66 pp.
Kherdian’s poems have been a real pleasure to read. Classically simple and unaffected, they effectively and subtly evoke a picture of a love affair. While the principal one concerns the courtship and marriage of his Wife Nonny and himself, the most pervasive love is larger—Kherdian is a’man in love with life itself.
The Nonny Poems begins in New York and traces the growth from recognition and friendliness, though the crucible of decisions resulting in marriage, and evidently, the deliberate taking up of a new and relatively simple life in New Hampshire.
Both he and his’ wife are Armenian and the poems do have a resultant piquant flavor. Yet the dominant tone is in-the-grain American—but not chauvinistically so. Universality rather than nationality, a charming simplicity and honesty predominate. W. D. Snodgrass in an essay on “Heart’s Needle” maintains that perhaps the poet’s being truly open, fully personal, while thus risking obscurity, offers the greatest chance to affect the reader most directly. Kherdian has done just that in these two volumes. I’m hardly calling him’ a “confessional” poet, not that that would necessarily imply derogation; rather, I’m noting how straight forwardly the persona involves the reader.
Yet these thoroughly modern poems are not shocking in their language or scenes. They surprise and kindle with their directness. Their quality reminds me somehow of Brautigan— fresh and pleasing. And filled with gusto. For example, in “Getting Married,” as the couple return with the license the persona deliberately startles his partner by shouting the title— and is rewarded with her glance. It works. Or similarly in the delightful “Nonny Your Shoes,” the persona utters an apostrophe to the feet that normally fill the shoes.