The Turn of the Tiller; The Spill of the Wind

In these honest and sometimes unsettling poems, Nancy Austin takes us on a journey through the joy and pain of life. We become familiar with death but also the “bowls of July.” As I read these poems I feel like I am being followed by spirits of another world as well as the real birds of Earth. The poet’s intimacy with the natural world is evident in her realistic descriptions, inspiring us to take a closer look at the world around us.

—Jan Chronister, author of Caught between Coasts, Casualties and Target Practice.

Nancy Austin builds her poetry the way a sculptor builds a clay model. What the reader sees on the outside is often a view of nature that catches not just the description, but the essence of sights and sounds of the outside world. But it is the armature of human experience that gives the poetry almost a sense of personification. And it is in her more bare-boned poetry that you find that steel armature has a soul.

—Janet Taliaferro, author of Breaking the Surface, A Sky for Arcadia, Virgin Hall and CityScapes.

Nancy Austin’s empathetic earmarks the poems in her new book. True to the title, The Turn of the Tiller, the Spill of the Wind, the poems, predominantly in the first person, feature movement and an elegiac tone as unifying factors. One of my favorite selections, The Aerodynamics of the Muse, is a metaphoric description of the process of poetic creation that I wish I had written: “Poems, like paper airplanes, are prototypes/ of the real thing, whose unfolding is in the weight/ of the paper…...” The Secrets of Trees, a lovely piece in which a clump of birch trees reflect human bonds, ends with the Italian phrase meaning “sisters forever”.…… “They lean in, hold each other up, sorelle per sempre.”

—Patricia Williams, author of Midwest Medley: Places & People, Wild Things & Weather and The Port Side of Shadows: Poems of Travel