Gravel and Hawk, winner of the Hollis Summers Prize

“Even if you never cared for rural, or you grew up in a city, (Gravel and Hawk) will change you. The natural world lives within this poet in disciplined poems of comfortable silence bracketing culture cells of country life. There is substance in these reflections. The subjects are rudimentary; the emotions are gravitational fields of honesty.”

       ~Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Gravel and Hawk is an elegiac book­—explicitly so in the poems honoring relatives and friends who have died, and implicitly so in many other poems that recreate the daily textures of a farm-centered life. As a whole this book delivers a rich sense of a past deeply examined.”

        ~Mark Halliday, Hollis Summers Poetry Prize judge

“Nick Norwood’s newest collection is both beautifully restrained and intensely local. With impeccable craftsmanship, he delineates a farm, a family, neighbors: a place and a time. Yet something else is going on: the particulars of the poems gather a subterranean strength and by book’s end we are shocked to realize how attached we have become to another’s memories, how those memories have taken up residence in our own minds. This is the marvel of poetry, and Norwood achieves it with grace and intelligence.”

      ~Kelly Cherry, author of The Retreats of Thought: Poems

“Gravel and Hawk reads like a superb family album of photographs and videos of memories and dreams. There is a James Agee-like sharpness and alertness of observation in the images of tractors, cattle, Victrolas, boats, ancestors, awakening love. Norwood captures the fleeting insights of adolescence, the humiliations and victories of childhood, and inklings of mortality, in portraits achingly vivid, in riffs spare and honest, bringing the past alive in a fresh idiom.”

      ~Robert Morgan, author of Terroir and Gap Creek