Dear Blackbird,$12.95Jane Springer 88 pp., 5½ x 9 Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and a former professor at the University of Utah. Dear Blackbird, by Jane Springer, is the 2006 prize-winning volume selected by this year's judge, J. D. McClatchy. Dear Blackbird, Last night I drank to the measureless arc of you—your body’s black rivermark over the levy. If there was a sound at all in the night then it was as the dog’s fencehowl splintered off from a chorus of running loose hounds. If there was a thought it was the brittle dry husk of a thought’s discontent at containment & of its leaning toward a new frost. If there is a motion I’ve memorized its slight idiosyncrasies: The glitch in the loop of the root underfoot— rain leaving one swath of light to mark the way of your flight through this field. Toward what heaven or abyss do you go—lead by the dry inkwell of one blighted eye, the good one stocked with such stolen grain. What your wings know—eclipsing them both. Your wings, eclipsing the moon. I do not say that I wished to go with you— I do not say that I wished to go with you— Truly as was & as Jane Springer grew up in a myriad of small towns in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. A doctoral candidate, she currently teaches English in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Praises and Reviews “Most new poetry I read nowadays seems decorous in its austerities or its embellishments: willed, over-plotted, dry. Not Jane Springer’s. Her work leaps to its tasks with a heady extravagance. Dear Blackbird, is her letter to the world, as eerie as Dickinson’s. Its pages don’t depend on a sequence of neat stanzas but are a surge of incantatory phrases and feelings. The skin of each poem quivers with the mind’s contradictions, the heart’s panic. It is risky, not merely reckless; rapturous, not merely rapacious. Memories spill over fantasies, Southern lore collides with hipster know-how. This book is the most exciting debut in years, and when we remember that “début” originally meant to score first in a new game, that is just what Springer has done: taken on a new set of terms and struck first, struck gold.” — J. D. McClatchy "Jane Springer's poetry, anthologized in the pages of Dear Blackbird. . .documents her impressive flair for free verse lyrics that are not restricted to the boundaries of ordinary stanza sequences of formats but are as original in their composition as they are in the content. Lovers of language and appreciators of poetry will enjoy the originality and engagement of Springer's deftly crafted verse." -The Midwest Book Review |
