Nance Van Winckel - Böcker

The new century peeled me bone bare like a songinside a warbler - that bird, people,who knows not to go where the sky'sstopped.Over the years, Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sureand startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling, Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly peopled with figures from this and parallel worlds - Simone Weil, Verlaine, Nabokov, Eurydice, "the new boys" working in the morgue, and others - No Starling moves beyond a reliance on the dramatic resonance of individual characters. Its vision is deeper, its focus both singular and communal: the self on its journey through the world ("Mouth, mouth: my light / and my exit. Let nothing / block the route"), and our responsibilities as a people for the precarious state of that world.SlateMy too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in backsluice right. I was driving with the dead Nancein the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't workso there was an added worry of runningout of juice. Her word. Her word onewindy evening with the carpetsstripped from a floor, whichsurprised us as stone - slatefrom the quarry we wereheaded to now, but Let's first have ussome juice, she'd said, then, barefoot on bare slate.The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet,thuds left, clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving,sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottledon my windshield. Thank God, here's the quarry,and there's the high ledge, where, as a girl longago, she'd stepped bravely from the whitetowel and stared down. Then she'd held her noseand leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.

Lynette is recuperating from botched Lasik surgery. Her eyesight is damaged, but as she ""looks"" back on the events of her past, she realizes she may not have seen them correctly when she was actually living them. Her husband's death . . . was it a suicide? The bones unearthed on her uncle's Montana ranch - are they of a steer? a mastodon? a dinosaur? Her beloved cousin Jessie - did she slip into addiction, and if so, where did the addict life take her? The dots of Lynette's past are blurry, but she tries to focus and connect them and to feel her way toward a more accurate vision of the person she has been and may become.Lynette and her two cousins, Jessie and Buster, narrate the linked short stories that make up Boneland. Their fathers, brothers, grew up on the ranch in Montana, a place rich in dinosaur fossils that gives the book its title. Continuing an enormous task begun two generations back, one of the uncles is still reconstructing a fossil in the old hay shed. The cousins, meanwhile, carry on the family tradition of reconstructing the mysteries of the past. All three have trouble defining and maintaining their identities. And only they understand the idiosyncrasies of their family - which Nance Van Winckel treats as a character in this ingeniously linked collection of stories. The family is a creature reconstructed from the slippery events of everyone's past.Fate is sudden and powerful in the life of this clan. A baby is dropped, a family drowned, a tsunami in Thailand changes the course of an already troubled life. Van Winckel releases time from strict adherence to chronology to reveal surprising correspondences. With shifting points of view and distinctive voices, these linked stories, in the hands of a master of the genre, capture the mutability of human experience and the meandering plot lines that make up our lives.

Van Winckel's poems hover at the intersections of folktale and history, of past life regressions and future life visions, in a voice that is intimate, eerie, wry, and always strangely like a voice that has been going on in our heads without our noticing. The chill and pleasure it renders is a little like what one feels upon first reading Proust.