Jetty & Other Poems

Talvikki Ansel's "Jetty" displays a prosodic mastery of the natural world that I have encountered in very few poets in the past few years. This thin little volume is a treasure trove of gems that make "mother earth" come alive in her banality and majesty: "The Tree List" is an example of what Ansel can do at her best, and that's something. "Tree of the snow-white villa/tree of the blackbird/of ox blood/of corn popped over a fire/tree of warm boulders/of sleep in the sun.." I would encourage more fans of poetry to take a good look at this. James Dickey made the right choice nominating this collection for an award.

In Talvikki Ansel's new book Jetty and Other Poems we enter a rugged and rocky world at the edge of the sea or pond. These are stern and precise poems marked by the craft that caught James Dickey's eye when he chose her first book as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The poems here traverse valleys and disturbances, what's quiet and dangerous. They offer a kind of solitude that's as stark and clear as a woodblock print, but not without its meticulous joys. History, divinations, the daily inquiry, these poems seek for that thing to steer by which may be only "the one pine on the coast." "The projecting jetty that keeps storms / from the market square" protects us just long enough to watch the clam in the water glass blossom.