Up Late by Nick Laird: A passionate, angry, brilliant elegy to his father’s death with Covid

“If I shut my eyes to the new dark,” begins Nick Laird’s long title poem, “I find that I start to experience time in its purest state…”. Up Late, an elegy for his father’s death with Covid-19, moves beyond private subject matter, forming an intense examination of time and space, a terrifying reflection of current human existence:

On Sunday they permitted us to Zoom ... he was prone in a hospital gown strapped to a white slab.

The hospital gown split at the back ...

... He lifted his head to the camera ...

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Up Late, passionate and angry as Hamlet, is formally brilliant, an exercise in control. The creator in Theodicy asserts, “ ... there’s no decent performance without restraint” – yet control isn’t always possible: “You could never let anything go, a trait/I also suffer from, and kind of admire, but/that isn’t possible here.” And restraint earns one satisfying rhyming outburst, “Alastair Laird is dead. Fuckety fuck. Fuckety/fuck fuck fuck fuck. My dad is dead. Bad luck.”

Like Hamlet, like George Oppen referenced in Feedback, Laird draws strength from contraries, “ ... in the wallet/ of the poet sit the business cards ... declaring, /on one side, the statement the other side is true,//…on the other side, the statement on the other side’s a lie.” (The Vocation). Talking to the Sun in Washington Square echoes O’Hara’s and Mayakovsky’s conversations with the sun while family feels central, “Looking after children means simultaneously building a field hospital, a hedge school, a diner ...”

Against the “new dark” Inside Voice’s precise observation of his son is full of sunlight, “Even the way he eats I kind of find/fascinating, chewing with a camel’s /abstraction ... I watch him as a lover/ or as a mother might. He’s as excited /about my pasta and pesto/ ... grated cheddar cheese I’ve just/cut the mould off as he is about/ Christmas ...”

The frustrations of filial love are nailed precisely, often exasperated, “ ... after Mum died,/left bewildered, adrift, ordering crap online” or deeply funny in Basically Adidas where Laird’s father acquires “a bootful ... of navy tracksuits ... I would set my head against the glass/just like this/as the Ford Granada sailed round the estate/ ... Dad ... standing on the doorstep/ talking to Richie Smith –/So what it is//is they’re basically Adidas,/they’re made the same, but they have these two stripes instead of three.”