Eagle & Phenix

The poems in Nick Norwood’s Eagle & Phenix have the desolate, sun-struck beauty of Edward Hopper’s paintings, and are peopled by figures, lonely but dignified, who might have wandered right out of those paintings into these pages. The book expands ever outward from a childhood spent largely alone, to ancestors and family, a vividly depicted town and its working inhabitants, and a sense of history’s conflagrations—yet a perennial capacity for wonder keeps rising out of the ashes, reminding us that “what survives may bless by simply being here.” ~ Jeffrey Harrison

Nick Norwood’s poems in Eagle and Phenix are a superb, evocative melding of perfect restraint with concise but lush detail, of elegiac memory with bittersweet realization. His evocations of time and place, of work once valued and love betrayed, never diminish hope but pay homage to life’s capacity to strengthen and even renew itself at the most broken of places. ~ Melissa Pritchard

In Eagle & Phenix, Norwood writes stirringly of the intersection of personal reflection and art, bemused by our need to inscribe the present with our own past. His fascination with time’s gifts and ravages attends intensely to the evolving mysteries of the Other in acutely terse narratives about loved ones, ancestors, and past denizens of Columbus, Georgia, transcribing the “obsolete vernacular” of its landscape and history.  With a judicious reticence reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, these poems see into the elliptical life of things with the kind of stark imagery and tonal gradation that make a poem pulse with life, walk off the page, and follow you out of the room down the long, long hallway.  ~ J. Allyn Rosser

With Eagle & Phenix, Nick Norwood picks up where he left off in Gravel and Hawk in a way that continues the journey of an observant, isolated boy in the south, but finds new landscapes moving from the farmland flats and oilfields of Texarkana in his previous book to the hills and Chattahoochee River of Georgia which may be a bit more populated, but still leave us with the isolated, keen-eyed boy from before, just in perhaps a more present and less nostalgic way. ~ DJ Ferguson

 The poet's eye is like a camera, panning around places so that readers see the space with renewed senses. . . . As the title of the poem (and the book) suggests through the image of a phoenix, the poems are a form of rebirth; they reenact old routines, revisit abandoned buildings, and call up deceased loved ones, and through this recreation, Norwood reveals new appreciations for the things of this world. The result is an enjoyable, accessible book of poems that remind us of how the image is still the heart of poetic memory-making. ~Aisha Sharif 

You are going to love this guy for his clarity and cunning — his field studies of human behavior — reaching and never overreaching — that’s what I like. This is skillful living and skillful writing about it. ~ Grace Cavalieri