Tuesday, September 09, 2014

Nancy P. Davenport, La Brizna 



Nancy P. Davenport, La Brizna (BookGirl Press, Sendai, Japan; distributed in the USA by Mountains & Rivers Press, PO Box 5389, Eugene, OR 97405) $10.

I like small poems and small books. Perhaps you know that. This is not quite small enough to be "pocket poetry," this book of poems, La Brizna by Nancy P. Davenport, but these are small poems with large hearts. They are not afraid of silence, nor white space, nor unconfined wonder. They are not afraid of fear.

I might tell you that the poems are Eastern in a way I like, open to awe, quiet, unassuming, yet they come with a steel spine. These are not "wisps" at all. It takes a long time to learn to write poems like these, yet this is, I believe, Davenport's first book. Bravo!

Let me close by sharing "A Zen Morning," one of the twenty poems in the book, and fairly representative of the rest of them:

this morning
I manage
to walk into
a moment

 of
such immense
                  silence
such profound
                   stillness
that the rose
petals
falling in
the
sunlight on my
coffee table 
make a sound
like the
                     ocean

# posted by Tom Montag @ 4:14 PM

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?