"Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world," Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote, "and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." This sentiment comes to mind when reading Nancy Willard. The Sea at Truro, Willard's 12th collection of poems, showcases her talent both for revealing the simple beauty in everyday life and for celebrating the people, the plants and the natural world that surround us.
Divided into five distinct parts, the poems in The Sea at Truro range in topic from the seemingly ordinary (a glass goblet, a tangerine, a bumblebee) to the more extraordinary (death and dying, grief and the afterlife, the worrisome state of our planet). Regardless of the subject matter, Willard's poetry is direct, often inquisitive and almost always notable for its striking imagery. Consider these lines from "Raphael's Goblet":
this tall, thin-lipped cup
as milky in the making
as if it held fog, or a veil
of smoke from its days
and nights in the fire,
a finger bone from a star.
Or, from the book's title poem:
long ropes of sand ridged like muscles
on the sea's floor, seeded with
ghostly pebbles polished like eggs
waiting in weedy nests.
The Sea at Truro will speak to many readers, whether or not they've read Willard's work. And most will not be able to resist revisiting a poem or two again in the future. --Roni K. Devlin, owner, Literary Life Bookstore