Spokes of Dream and Bird - by Patricia Nelson (Paperback)

About the Book

To read Patricia Nelson's poetry is to enter a vortex of language pushing you to a world that is sideways and awry. These hinted shapes breathe a tremendous vitality as each creature strives to "untwist the sky," and tell "a truth of salt and star." -Jean Wong, author of Sleeping with the Gods

Book Synopsis

In Patricia Nelson's poems, language is a vessel--sometimes a jeweled container to catch the ineffable, to harness or restrain its power like a djinni; sometimes a boat on the vast sea-surface, catching the winds of exhilarated flight or foundering in storms. This is the vessel with which the poet sets out, and we, her readers, are along for the journey. Through ancient Celtic forests, Dante's landscape of the damned, and the garden of wordless, singing light from which our consciousness exiles us, Nelson's poems offer a riddling map home--a way to reach one another, to counter the loneliness of our human being.

- Terry Ehret, author of Lucky Break and Night Sky Journey

Review Quotes

In the beginning, they say, was the word. Patricia Nelson, mistress of words that she is, is interested in what lies before that beginning. Was the invention of language, she seems to ask in some of her poems, entirely a gain? . . . . Again and again she zeroes in on the ways language can reduce experience, not do justice to it. Many of her poems feature those who abuse the language in some form. Orators, politicians, preachers come in for some bad reviews. They are shown using language to narrow things, limit things, draw lines that should not be drawn. . . . Nelson has great sympathy for the people--and creatures--that find themselves on the wrong side of the borders that words and analogous human powers create.
--John Hart, author of The Climbers and Storm Camp, co-editor of Blue Unicorn

To read Patricia Nelson's poetry is to enter a vortex of language pushing you to a world that is sideways and awry. These hinted shapes breathe a tremendous vitality as each creature strives to "untwist the sky," and tell "a truth of salt and star." Patricia's touch can be deceptively light and gentle. But do not be lulled by the lovely "song that widens the mouth like a vowel"-- read further and you may find "your red heart banging in its bowl."
--Jean Wong, author of Sleeping with the Gods and Hurtling Jade and Other Tales of Personal Folly

Patricia Nelson's poetry startles that mindspace where all known and well-worn thoughts live, scattering linguistic lodgepoles. Her words break open the familiar and pull us to the mumbling edge of unconscious recognition.
--Briahn Kelly-Brennan, poet

In Spokes of Dream or Bird, Patricia Nelson reminds us again how words and things relate, and how sometimes they don't. For all that language is, for all it describes, shapes, enhances, and liberates, it remains discrete from its object, a pure label. In four parts, she explores "an old thought - like a small-footed spider." Proposing that dreaming is surfing waves to the shore, she challenges the very idea of the mind and its workings, its connection to language, and language's approximation of both subject and object. It's the best we can do, with poetry an apt translator. These are poems of thought, of the mysticism of the Druids, the symbolism of trees, the universality of Odysseus Ulysses and his phantoms and phantasms, of dear ones lost, of permanence and impermanence, taking the stage quietly, in the shadows, "colors quiet in their jambs/edges understood."
--Jeff Santosuosso, poet, co-editor of Panoply, former co-editor of Emerald Coast Review