At one point in her sixth and latest collection of poetry, The World Behind the World, April Bernard writes that “almost nothing is so terrible it cannot // also be of interest.” These lines are honest: it’s “almost nothing,” not nothing; it’s “of interest,” not good. But they also show Bernard’s sense that, as she writes in an earlier collection, amid “all this brawl and jag” of existence still “a sluice of sweet delight / runs through them.” If that sounds like Gerard Manley Hopkins, it’s for good reason: he is a central presence in The World Behind the World.
Bernard has always had a good eye and an even better ear. She’s interested in music: why we make it and why we listen to it, how it moves us and what it means to be moved by art in the first place. For her, the aesthetic orients us, in complicated and deep ways, toward the real. As she writes in an earlier collection, “When actors speak and move / we all become more / real.” As she writes in The World Behind the World, “Making music, we / make God thereby, / or a simulacrum / so powerful I fear / to meet the real thing.”
Bernard and I spoke by email.
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