“Serious art does not need to be weighty or explicitly topical. It
can be, as it is here, apparently as light as a feather: The
Lumberjack’s Dove is, in its manner, a folktale; it is also a
meditation on attachment, on loss, on transformation. Like its less
humble relatives, myth and parable, it is pithy, magical, its many
insights, its cautions and clarifications, unfolding in a chain of
brief scenes and koan-like revelations. This is a book of unexpected
lightness and buoyancy, as necessary in our tense period as the more
urgent confrontations.” --Louise Gluck A boldly original and
visceral debut collection from the winner of the 2017 National Poetry
Series Competition, selected by Louise Gluck In the ingenious and
vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose
Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an
axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts
into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in
the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of
being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing,
time and memory, and—finally—considering the act of storytelling
itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two
all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to
share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,”
Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled,
sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.” Inflected with the
uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly
shifting of points-of-view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly
textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.
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22/11/2018 Last update