Gravel and Hawk — 2012 ·

Poems

By Nick Norwood

“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 substantiability in these reflections. The subjects are rudimentary; the emotions are gravitational fields of honesty.”

Washington Independent Review of Books

“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

“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

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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.