Publisher Description

The new century peeled me bone bare like a songinside a warbler - that bird, people,who knows not to go where the sky'sstopped.Over the years, Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sure
and startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling, Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly peopled with figures from this and parallel worlds - Simone Weil, Verlaine, Nabokov, Eurydice, "the new boys" working in the morgue, and others - No Starling moves beyond a reliance on the dramatic resonance of individual characters. Its vision is deeper, its focus both singular and communal: the self on its journey through the world ("Mouth, mouth: my light / and my exit. Let nothing / block the route"), and our responsibilities as a people for the precarious state of that world.
SlateMy too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in backsluice right. I was driving with the dead Nancein the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't workso there was an added worry of runningout of juice. Her word. Her word onewindy evening with the carpetsstripped from a floor, whichsurprised us as stone - slatefrom the quarry we wereheaded to now, but Let's first have ussome juice, she'd said, then, barefoot on bare slate.The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet,thuds left, clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving,sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottledon my windshield. Thank God, here's the quarry,and there's the high ledge, where, as a girl longago, she'd stepped bravely from the whitetowel and stared down. Then she'd held her noseand leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.

Notes

Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sure and startling command of images and ideas, Nance Van Winckel's poems make every gesture of language count

Author Biography

Nance Van Winckel teaches in the graduate creative writing programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College. She is the author of four books of poetry and three collections of short stories. Her numerous awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, two Washington State Artist Trust Awards, and Poetry Magazine's Friends of Literature Award. After a Spell won the Washington State Governor's Award for Poetry.SlateMy too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in backsluice right. I was driving with the dead Nancein the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't workso there was an added worry of runningout of juice. Her word. Her word onewindy evening with the carpetsstripped from a floor, whichsurprised us as stone - slatefrom the quarry we wereheaded to now, but Let's first have ussome juice, she'd said, then, barefoot on bare slate.The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet,thuds left, clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving,sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottledon my windshield. Thank God, here's the quarry,and there's the high ledge, where, as a girl longago, she'd stepped bravely from the whitetowel and stared down. Then she'd held her noseand leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.

Table of Contents

I / Doorman
Slate
Waking, Working
Mister
We Called Goodgye, but She Was Already Gone
Agape
Black Stitches, Black Knots
Doorman
The New Boys Will Never Love You
In the New Boy's In-Basket
All Asides Aside
White Marginalia
Errata
RE: The Two New Boys
The Rattled Hymn of the RepublicII / Middle, Nowhere
Before There Was a Road (On the Way to Wilburville)
Middle, Nowhere
Seme and Semaphore
I Am on a Break
Retrograde: Echoes from Earlier Chapters
Passing Through the Shadows of Great Buildings
The Usual
When the Van Broke DownIII /Threshold
Reentry
White Brides, White Mistresses
Almost an End of Absinthe
Verlaine in Prison
Simone Weil at the Renault Factory (1935)
At Some Point the River Always Veers Away from the Road
The Winter Cow
Eurydice
Our Ladies of Elsewhere
You PeopleIV / We Fall in Behind
We Fall in Behind
Fuck It
Notes
Upriver: Distinctions of Never and Ever
The Ones You Love Are Cold
Let Me Remind You You Are Still Under Oath
I Talk to the Bread, I Chat with the Dough
Breaking Only Little Laws
Indiscriminate Kisses
Leastways
Adieu
Hand-Embroidered Mourning Piece for Clara Elisabeth Kriebel, 1779
Bid Me Be the BirdAcknowledgments
About the Poet

Review

"No Starling touches upon spiritual and political issues alike, signing aloud in a crystal clear voices that deserves to be heard." * Midwest Book Review *

Promotional

Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sure and startling command of images and ideas, Nance Van Winckel's poems make every gesture of language count

Review Quote

No Starling touches upon spiritual and political issues alike, signing aloud in a crystal clear voices that deserves to be heard.

Details