COMPLETING THE ARC

W.H. Auden says poetry is "a clear expression of mixed feelings," and that's one of the gifts in this compelling book of poems. Nancy Hewitt traces the movement from the constrictions of a 1950's childhood, content to draw within the lines, to an adult freedom in which she can say, "I use language to open the skies." The speaker does not shy away from trouble, but traces the complex entanglements of family narrative with insight and compassion. Art and travel become ways the world opens up for this speaker, as when she visits the Guggenheim and learns "the fine art of looking out and up." Indeed, she looks and sees with remarkable clarity. There's a fine tension here between the need for measure and the longing for abundance, and amazingly these poems give us both through their shapely forms and vivid moments of transport. Hewitt is a poet of rich vision and intelligence, and this is a beautiful book.-Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows
Nancy Hewitt's beautifully crafted chapbook begins in childhood and ends in wisdom. Visual art provides a frequent counterpoint to the harsh realities the poet remembers and, in the wider world, observes. Most centrally "there's the light offered up by words," which fill the poems with vivid images and narratives that will linger long in the reader's mind.-Martha Collins
"No ideas but in things." Nancy Hewitt proves the point of that William Carlos Williams line in her new collection. Here are poems about a trailer park childhood where her parents' volatile marriage is on display. Here, many inventive prose and ekphrastic poems. Here, landscape poems of Barcelona and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, awash in oh, so much color and light, "the light offered up by words," as Hewitt says in her title poem. Her words, that light-here now for you.-Moira Linehan, author of Toward and & Company