No Starling

<p>The new century peeled me bone bare like a song<br/><br/>inside a warbler - that bird people<br/><br/>who knows not to go where the sky's<br/><br/>stopped.<br/><br/>Over the years Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable wry always provocative displaying a sure<br/><br/>and startling command of images and ideas her poems make every gesture of language count. In <i>No Starling</i> 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 - <i>No Starling</i> 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.<br/><br/><br/><br/>Slate<br/><br/>My too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in back<br/><br/>sluice right. I was driving with the dead Nance<br/><br/>in the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't work<br/><br/>so there was an added worry of running<br/><br/>out of juice. Her word. Her word one<br/><br/>windy evening with the carpets<br/><br/>stripped from a floor which<br/><br/>surprised us as stone - slate<br/><br/>from the quarry we were<br/><br/>headed to now but Let's first have us<br/><br/>some juice she'd said then barefoot on bare slate.<br/><br/>The truck-bedded Nance wrapped in her winding sheet<br/><br/>thuds left clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving<br/><br/>sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottled<br/><br/>on my windshield. Thank God here's the quarry<br/><br/>and there's the high ledge where as a girl long<br/><br/>ago she'd stepped bravely from the white<br/><br/>towel and stared down. Then she'd held her nose<br/><br/>and leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.</p>