nibs & nubs by Josh Stenberg, Flying Islands Books 2023, was launched by Jean Kent at the Poets’ Picnic, Markwell, NSW on Dec 10^th 2023 and Newcastle Writers Festival, April 6^th 2024

When I first received the manuscript for nibs & nubs, I was immediately intrigued by the title. What are these ‘nibs’ and ‘nubs’? They are written in lower case and joined by an ampersand, so that they look like humble specks on the page. The effect is surprising and puzzling, as well as beguiling.

What exactly Josh means with this almost throwaway phrase, I don’t know. And I suspect many readers won’t know either, so, like them, I’ve had to do some investigating. According to my dictionaries (and Google), a ‘nib’ is ‘something that comes to a point’, whereas a ‘nub’ is the ‘gist or essence of a problem’. There are other, more imaginative interpretations, but in this little nutshell of nicely arranged letters, I think we do have a neat summary of the book. These are poems which examine a life’s experiences in sharp detail, probing deeply for meaning. As the words in the title suggest, the writing will be playful, clever, and unexpected.

An utter delight in language propels so many of the poems. Josh has such a natural fluency and feeling for how to let a poem become itself – it all feels effortless! – and he combines this with much wit and delightful leaps of thought.

 In the poem ‘practical theology’, he gives us a darkly humorous image of souls which have invisible bulk like molten lead. All this invisible weight needs to be hauled up via pulleys by the angels, risking collisions with aircraft and ‘altercations with spirits of departed birds …’

now you understand why the day of
judgment has been infinitely sorry i meant
to say indefinitely delayed

This is typically nimble side-stepping within a sentence, slipping in an unexpected meaning then deftly moving away and on to another.

Another poem, “noisy miner” plays beautifully on the name of that noisy bird. Here are the lovely first lines:

honey-eater, cross-eyed swooping to the delinquent
catgrass seeds, what do you mine?

A cacophony of words, worthy of the bird, follows! The end is effectively affecting. The bird, caught by a cat, is sympathetically described and mourned:

noisy miner, beloved mine, for all your subspecies, for all
the delicious lizards and mosquitoes you have feasted on,
and for all your being regrettably and briefly mine, what
did you mine?

What the deceptively humble title, nibs & nubs, did not prepare me for, was the range and ambition of this book. These poems travel from childhood to mid-life. They move from early years with racoons and tiger lilies in Canada, to present days with pericarditis and the clogged traffic of Paramatta Road in Sydney. Along the way, there is a dizzying list of places around the globe – China, Japan, Taiwan, Prague, Barcelona, Lenin Square …

All these places are recorded with convincing details, and they are peopled by sympathetically observed others. One of my favourite examples of this is in the poem “convenience”, where the banal payment with a credit card, dependent upon the worldwide mysteries of technology, is juxtaposed with an exotic Asian scene of ‘embalmed jackfruit’ and ‘dregs of the dregs of tea culture’.

With so much travelling and world crossing – and perhaps seeking of a personal place of belonging – inevitably, the poems also expose an anxiety that all these experiences may be futile. This is particularly poignant in a poem like “right there in prague”, where the collision with history in a Jewish graveyard brings a sense of an obliquely rejected past:  

the gutted sense the sensual gut
that i was a know-nothing tourist to courses of my own
past, rejected, or untransmitted.

In “lay over in taiwan”, the feeling of dislocation is beautifully captured: 

i stretch out across the
sea of words and the
sleeve of homelands
abandoned, rediscovered, reneged,
and wake in a nook of red wax…
allayed, laid up waiting for my
lagging self, delayed in
transit

Moments of wisdom slip in. Often, they have a punch of anger which feels honest and right, leading to imagery which is also shockingly apt. “against the lies about grief”, for example, ends like this:

grief is a rat which snatches your self
and gnaws you bit by bit away in the walls

In a description of a “set piece for national male choral competition”, however, there is also an awareness that we may value the imperfectness we’re granted. A search for grace recurs throughout the book. In “Sydney Sunday trapeze school open day”, we have a glimpse of transcendence as

on any given day four women
summoned the will to climb silk ropes
risk falls and accidental strangulation
for the pleasure and ogle of pure suspension …

…..their limbs starring, human mobiles.
praise to the days remembered

for and of this long (enough?) respite.

And in “red button phone of impatient old man kiosk”, although the old man is

rushing adieus before the ticking over
of that minute,

the poem still comes to this lyrical end:

allow me this romance: that
once I was real and whole in the rain.

Nibs & nubs is a book which is not afraid to record genuine experience with a very sharp nib, generously going deep to the nub of one person’s life. It is a book to read slowly, with awe for its poetic audacity and skill, and gratitude for its sharing of a gamut of emotion from grief to grace. I am delighted to declare it launched.

 – Jean Kent

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Jean Kent was born in Chinchilla in 1951 and grew up in rural Queensland. Her awards include the Anne Elder Prize, Dame Mary Gilmore Award and Wesley Michel Wright Prize for her books; and the National Library Prize, Josephine Ulrick Prize, Somerset Prize, Dorothy Porter Prize and runner-up for the Newcastle Prize for individual poems. She has also received several writing grants from the Australia Council, including Overseas Residencies in Paris in 1994 and 2011. Ten books of her poetry have been published. The most recent are: The Shadow Box (Pitt Street Poetry, 2023), a book-length sequence based on the experiences of her maternal grandparents during and shortly after WWI; and Paris Light: A Personal ‘Plan de Paris’ (Pitt Street Poetry, 2024), a celebration of Paris combining poems by Jean with paintings by her husband, Martin. Jean and Martin currently live at Lake Macquarie, NSW. jeankent.net.au.

nibs & nubs by Josh Stenberg is available from https://flyingislandspocketpoets.com.au/product/nibs-nubs-by-josh-stenberg/