First published 2014
Nancy Willard moves through landscapes of memory where the dead return to speak. A sister visits her brother the night after her memorial service. A grandfather calls his daughter three days after dying, his voice reaching her as she carries wind-dried laundry from the line. Willard walks among these visitations, finding Walt Whitman eating supper from brown paper and watching potatoes open their eyes like sleepers waking. She listens to ant gossip and studies the careful manners of dragonflies. The sea reads newspapers slowly like old men in libraries. Each poem becomes a meeting place where human grief encounters the patient rhythms of the natural world. Willard plants narcissus bulbs in cemetery soil, knowing they will wake singing in spring. She recovers fragments of innocent youth while giving voice to the plant and animal mysteries that surround daily life. The collection moves between loss and discovery, showing how childhood never truly disappears and how the dead continue their conversations through wind, water, and growing things.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, poetry, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, lyrical
Tropes: found-family, grief
Setting: Truro
Period: Spring
96 pages · Paperback · Knopf