EVERY BIRD IS ONE BIRD

by Francine Sterle

When Francine Sterle focuses her lyric attention on the world outside her window, what resonates is the savage, the sensual, the redemptive. Co-winner of the Tupelo Press Editor's Prize in Poetry, "Every Bird is One Bird" explores the intimate and intricate relationships that exist between untamed nature-the world we watch-and inwardness-the world we sense. The poems disclose the unending and essential flow between the two. Fiercely beautiful, they convey an instinctive, emotional involvement that aspires to pure song. Many of the poems have a prismatic quality and depend on an incremental progression of time and detail. The landscape of northern Minnesota--its shrub swamps and needleleaf forests and grassy fields--is the archetypal and mythic well from which Sterle draws. She is rooted in her landscape-it is her source and her resource. As she shares her world of lakes and stunted pines, wildlife and wildflowers with us in hauntingly beautiful phrases, she moves softly and swiftly between the grand and the intimate. It claims her as a writer, and us as readers.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2001

About the author

A native of Minnesota, Francine Sterle is the author of Nude in Winter (Tupelo Press, 2006), Every Bird is One Bird (Editor's Prize, Tupelo Press 2001), and The White Bridge (Poetry Harbor, 1999). She is a recipient of a Loft-McKnight Foundation Award, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, a Career Development Grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, residency fellowships from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Leighton Studios at the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary as well as both a Fellowship Grant and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals and have been anthologized in To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets From Pre-territorial Days to the Present, 33 Minnesota Poets, and The Cancer Poetry Project. She lives on the West Two River with her husband, Jonathan Speare, a clinical psychologist, two Maine Coon cats, and an exuberant Rhodesian Ridgeback."

Reviews

[abby]

very well written poetry

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful nature-related poems, which were endorsed by Professor Peter Cooley. Tupelo press did an exquisite job with the lay out, design, and printing of this gorgeous collection. Sterle's descriptions are stellar, especially the poems on cave paintings.