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This image-rich collection captures the silent scream, confronts cultural distress, advances the mitigating calm of nature, reassembles the core components of hope.
ISBN: 978-1-952526-05-3
84 pages
Written during the Covid-19 pandemic, Austin’s poems chronicle, in lyrical language, an upended world. Through metaphor and introspection, this image-rich collection captures the silent scream, confronts cultural distress, advances the mitigating calm of nature, reassembles the core components of hope.
Ancestral
$25.00
A Hollow Bone
$16.00
Lamenting My Failure to Learn How to Tap Dance: And Other Missteps
$18.00
Something Novel Came In Spring
$15.00
Poems from the Winter House
$25.00
Linda Bavisotto Lemcke (verified owner) –
In this collection, her latest anthology, Nancy Austin chronicles in her very personal and accessible style keenly observed experiences springing out of pandemic deprivations and hardships, both her own and those of others. Her poems unblinkingly explore and seek to make sense of change, loss, the blurring of passage of time, and the behavior of leaders and institutions tasked with responding to the threats and fears, finding among all these experiences lessons and deeper meanings. The poetry is sage and invigorating: evoking maturity and a knowing wisdom born of isolation and disconnection, tempered by reflection, but also open to everyday surprises, unexpected delights in small dark corners, and admiring courage and examples of quiet human strength and vitality wherever these can be found. She seeks and finds solace and irony in nature, in solitude, and in symbols and signs perceived and interpreted through all the senses as she takes in the changing faces and seasons of the Northwoods that surround her. Prominent among her rich themes are the cycles of nature and its healing rhythms, and lessons taken from close observations of birds and other wildlife.
Her poetry is richly multi-layered, drawing often surprising juxtapositions between the deeply personal and more global concerns, both provocative and compelling. She lightly yet deliberately plays on these contrasts and similarities, particularly in the section titled Parallel Pandemic, drawing in the reader to consider these further and join their own experiences. She makes full use of many different poetic forms, as suits her content (“Haiku Trilogy”, stream-of-consciousness “Dreams in the Time of COVID”, “A Moment’s Embrace”, “A Piano Suite”). Implicit parallels are suggested in “America Un-Masked” and, with its evolving and sometimes inconsistent advisories, “CDC Is Killing Me.” In “Larcenia’s Son”, the recurring simple phrase “I—can’t—breathe” powerfully knits together a central image common to COVID ICUs, summer wildfire fighters, and contemporary news coverage of George Floyd’s death at the hands of police. “The Logistics of Conspiracy Theories” (“bad dogs get you to walk them…”) can be read as an intriguing metaphorical commentary on the prevalence and lure of deliberate misinformation resulting in the painful fragmentation of families and loved ones around COVID communications. “COVID Comes in Like a Comet” is reminiscent of the Emperor Nero fiddling while Rome burns around him.
The anthology can also be read as a chronology of the pandemic’s unfolding and its unforgiving persistence (“Safe House”, “As the Pandemic Unfolds:Two Interviews”, “Four Months In”) as the experience of “sheltering in place” for protection from the unseen virus brings isolation but also mixed blessings (opportunity for reflection, with forced time away from previous routine activities beginning to blur the boundaries of time (“stare at the walls, wait for the next call, Face Time, Zoom”). Leading off with “Safe House”, her rustic secluded Northwoods home initially feels like a remote retreat and safe haven from more urban early pandemic centers, but she wonders, as she observes from her window birds defending their nests against known enemies, how does one fight and stay vigilant against this invisible enemy, this virus, “novel, unknown and unseen”? She observes red squirrels chase each other, unaffected, “they don’t know”. She watches as “a breeze parts the reeds of an unattended nest –vulture changes course”.
Acutely attuned to the coping of other individuals in her own sphere of contact (“Checkout Girl, Aisle Six”), and of the sharp divisions which soon developed among neighbors, families, and a younger generation reacting very differently to information and attitudes toward risk-taking (“In the Scream of Things”, “Birds Not of a Feather”), she marvels by contrast at how readily the same community pulls together in a united mission to find Buddy, a missing dog out lost in the biting winter weather, and celebrating his ultimate rescue in “Close to Christmas”. Those gravely affected by the pandemic but who remain unseen are also remembered. A feeling of indebtedness grows “to those who run toward it [death]: unarmed doctors, nurses, pharmacy techs, shopkeepers, and the kind old man who delivers my groceries”: front-line workers who cannot choose the relative luxury to stay home and shelter in place. She celebrates the audacious resilience of Italians (“YouTube from Italy”) who collectively showed, in a characteristically spontaneous Italian display, unity and solidarity by coming together nightly at a pre-set time with a musical outpouring from their lock-down city balconies, affirming life and lifting spirits despite the tragedy of the high death counts sweeping through the country at that time. Drawing on her own experiences, she empathizes with the anxiety when family members cannot see or be with one another during medical crises (“Evan on the Outside”), and the palpable joy when they can finally reunite (meeting a new grandson after her daughter’s difficult pregnancy). She thoughtfully reflects on how pandemic is affecting young people who have been deprived during the most formative times of their lives of the company of peers and relatives. At the end of “As You Knew I Would”, she laments “Any poet would know to end the poem here, but this remembrance brings me to tears wondering how children of this pandemic will fare, not knowing the embrace of grandparents, aunts, uncles and friends.”
The book also succeeds as a pure collection of particularly poignant moments and realizations, and recognitions of how the new recapitulates the past (comparing then and now in “The Paradigm Shift”, “Making Soup with Yo-Yo Ma”, and noticing stillness (“I Rest My Oars”), with touches of nostalgia and pithy, often humorous misadventures (“COVID Camping”, “Cabin Fever”, “Creature Comforts”, Loons Stick an Icy Landing”, “Funeral Flowers”), and the grace of simply being (“Ornithology Calls the Day).
A unifying theme that ties together the several sections of the book evokes a wisdom absorbed from the changing faces of the moon. The initial section Mournful Moon captures reactions to the early phases of the pandemic. In “Her Last Full Moon”, she reflects on her own fond memories of a dear friend and mother-figure close to death. “Pandemic Moon” takes a less romantic lunar view, mindful of the cold hard reality of the moon: “my family looks to me for hope, but today it is as distant as the moon, give me this day to be dark”. The final three sections of the book “Your Wings”, “Muse More” and “Hope Moon” (“After Vaccines”, “The Pruning”, “A Return to Ordinary” and more) hold out hopes for a brighter future, with gratitude for the “intricacies of the ordinary” and need to “call back the forest”.
Michelle Zanoni –
Nancy Austin has the ability to use her personal perspective – soft, thoughtful, humorous — to illuminate modern American life. This collection of poems protests injustice and mourns the loss of connection in our present day lives due to pandemic, politics, and racial divisions. Yet it also looks both backwards and forwards in time and celebrates togetherness, family, and the sturdy, eternal beauty of the natural world – something we all share whether or not we notice it.
If you’re looking for sanity and comfort in a world that has gone crazy and cold – you must read this book of poems.
Susan Hamilton –
In Nancy Austin’s fourth book of poetry, she once again shares her soul, personal perspectives, and sense of humor. Nancy has the ability to capture the essence of our lives through the comfort of our relationships, the beauty and lessons from nature, and the still small voices that speak to us, offering hope and promise to our lives, especially during these Pandemic days. Read, reflect, cry, laugh, feel the love, as you savor these heartwarming poems.
Susan Gehl (verified owner) –
I highly recommend this compelling collection of poems. The author paints a picture of life during the Pandemic. It’s a time of racial tensions and political turmoil. She vividly captures the emotions of sadness, frustration, anger, fear, loss, and counters it with poems of hope, empathy and compassion. Her love of nature is used as a metaphor to tell stories that we can all relate to. I will treasure this book and re-read it many times as it stirred my soul and touched my heart deeply.