NN by Andrew Seguin
Tammy Journal, 2016
Poet Andrew Seguin steps back to the 1820s to dialogue with Nicéphore Niépce, one of photography’s founders, known as NN in the text. Seguin’s chapbook, titled NN, is an eerie compilation of Seguin’s photographs and biographic poems, including imagined letters between NN and his blood cousin, Alexandre Dubard de Curley.
Using grey imagery, conversation, and historic notations, Seguin makes his vision real; his speaker becomes a conversationalist with NN and history: “I: would you say you wanted to get to that other side / NN: are there debts there?” In most of the dialogues, NN is the expert, and the speaker is the questioner.
Seguin undoubtedly loves NN’s colors and pictures. The poem “Tuesday: history of photography” brings together grey and silver, mystery and winter and a mirror; other poems depict a dark chamber, a dark room, a room of shadows, and a wooden box. Color enhances the beautiful, anthropomorphic depiction of stormy emotions in “Les Vendanges, Charmes,”: “I am a land clouds won’t leave alone. / Body sees best these rates of peppered shade.” In “He was Joseph, First,” color renders the conundrum of humans as “grey— / The house of the man whose hours / Were asphalt, lavender, and tin.”
Although somber at times, the chapbook is not without its beautiful blooms. In “Last Visit to Chalon,” Seguin describes the seasons pleasantly: “on the way to / The roses called out in Latin / Behind the sand traps. / … on the last day / Of summer, the sun, /A lichen. The fall: punctual.” Seguin summons a whirlwind of temperaments and seasons; in one of the untitled conversational poems, NN’s study of lithography dances light and dark together “so the order of light and shadow inverts, the dark looks white, the white dark.”
Ultimately enchanting and enlightening, NN offers readers unconventional charm. It is an enjoyable and puzzling book to open, and a marvelously windy experience to unlock.
Mary M. Bryan is a student of Mind Reading, or as Lee University calls it: Psychology. She hails from a farm in Greeneville, Tennessee, and likes to feed bread to her three donkeys.