Gravel and Hawk — 2012 ·

Poems

By Nick Norwood

“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

“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

“In his new book, Norwood writes vividly and with concrete, true detail about lives forged here in East Texas.”

Texarkana Gazette

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Gravel and Hawk dwells on the physical and cultural landscapes of the Texarkana border region, an area of stark natural beauty and even starker manifestations of its human habitation: oil derricks and pump jacks, logging trucks, chicken houses, come-to-Jesus billboards, and greasy catfish joints, a patchwork of dying farm towns and ragtag municipalities laced together by county roads, state highways, and that treacherous, rust-hued slurry known as the Red River. Gravel and Hawk charts the emotional landscape of a single extended family, its history of loss and gain, and, especially, its encounters with violent death. It is an eminently readable collection, rooted in a distinctly American place and united by a poetic voice that is honest, sophisticated, and persuasive.

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Nick Norwood is the author of the poetry collections The Soft Blare and A Palace for the Heart and the fine press book Wrestle, which he produced in collaboration with the artist and master printer Erika Adams. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as Western Humanities Review, Southwest Review, Paris Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, and others.