COMPLETING THE ARC

<p class=ql-align-justify>W.H. Auden says poetry is a clear expression of mixed feelings and that's one of the gifts in this compelling book of poems. Nancy Hewitt traces the movement from the constrictions of a 1950's childhood content to draw within the lines to an adult freedom in which she can say I use language to open the skies. The speaker does not shy away from trouble but traces the complex entanglements of family narrative with insight and compassion. Art and travel become ways the world opens up for this speaker as when she visits the Guggenheim and learns the fine art of looking out and up. Indeed she looks and sees with remarkable clarity. There's a fine tension here between the need for measure and the longing for abundance and amazingly these poems give us both through their shapely forms and vivid moments of transport. Hewitt is a poet of rich vision and intelligence and this is a beautiful book.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Betsy Sholl</strong> author of <em>House of Sparrows</em></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Nancy Hewitt's beautifully crafted chapbook begins in childhood and ends in wisdom. Visual art provides a frequent counterpoint to the harsh realities the poet remembers and in the wider world observes. Most centrally there's the light offered up by words which fill the poems with vivid images and narratives that will linger long in the reader's mind.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Martha Collins</strong></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>No ideas but in things. Nancy Hewitt proves the point of that William Carlos Williams line in her new collection. Here are poems about a trailer park childhood where her parents' volatile marriage is on display. Here many inventive prose and ekphrastic poems. Here landscape poems of Barcelona and San Miguel de Allende Mexico awash in oh so much color and light the light offered up by words as Hewitt says in her title poem. Her words that light-here now for you.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Moira Linehan</strong> author of <em>Toward </em>and<em> & Company</em></p><p><br></p>