Reviews
With short lines and sly, syncopated rhymes, Wade's nature poems contain bliss and terror all at once, as when a vole plays in "fluid light / that screens the cryptic cat."
Deep Gossip is as beautiful and true, and alive with love, as life itself. The magnificence of Sidney Wade's vision is unmatched in American poetry. Wade gives us poems deeply sensual and smart, brilliantly formed to perfection—poems of cities and prairies, mountains, lakes, and the sea; poems in places of utmost tenderness and intimacy; poems that grapple with the evil in the body politic; poems of nature's inhabitants, engraved on the physics of the soul. Deep Gossip is a gift of a great and splendid heart from one of our most extraordinary poets.
Reading Deep Gossip, one realizes Sidney Wade, inquisitive, witty, at times dazzlingly rapturous, has long paid attention to every warren and den, to persevering landscapes, to ecological wonders, to nature's creaturely inhabitants, most especially to shifting, if not frustrating, political realities. Always scrupulous with her language, she privileges the rich province of the lyric with sonic verve, practicing a freedom and discipline attenuated and faithful to intimacies of thought.
Deep Gossip begins with Sidney Wade's newest work, spare, elegant poems in which every line is laden with meaning and music. Her microscopic eye peers into the natural world of bees, pollen, moths, and birds, birds, birds. This is a book suffused with light—dappled, blazing, luminosity and its shadow. She seems to be saying that we must look closely at the earth, and she is a transcendent guide to all we could lose.
Book Details
New Poems (2017-2019)
Fata Morgana
Three Voices
Bees
Pollen
"Human Food Consists Entirely of Souls"
Here, Kitty Kitty Kitty Kitty
Rosy Maple Moth
Memento Mori
Birdwatching
Figure and Ground: Cryptic Camouflage
New Poems (2017-2019)
Fata Morgana
Three Voices
Bees
Pollen
"Human Food Consists Entirely of Souls"
Here, Kitty Kitty Kitty Kitty
Rosy Maple Moth
Memento Mori
Birdwatching
Figure and Ground: Cryptic Camouflage and Vishal Rhyme
32 Birds
Junco in Snow
Nature Poets
Seeing the Opthalmologist
Eye
Skin
Fabric
Breath
Fear
Blood Moon
Spring Blizzard in Denmark, Kansas
Nothing New
Yellow-crowned Tyrannulet, Cock of the Rock, Northern Screamer
three small movements
The Foot
Gravediggers
Wood Stork
from Empty Sleeves (1991)
Snowy Owl
Swan Lake
A Local Habitation
Apostrophe to, and Roses for, Beatrice
Beatrice Rising
A River of Tongues
Pungent Sauces
De Ratione Amoris
Leaving Rome
Gas
Locus Amoenus
Kansas Weather
The Church and the Steeple
The Combine
Kirkeskibe—The Ship in the Church
from Green (1998)
Bricolage
Another Passionless Day
In the Library
Trapped in my Rib-cage, Something Throes and Aches...
Premature Ventricular Contractions
Alcaic Figure
Dog Sonnet
Byzantium
Dolphins in the Snow
Drinking Wine on a Hill Above the Confluence of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn
Cow Ford
Marriage: A Moment
For My Mother
Shore
Rain
Green
from From Istanbul/Istanbul'dan (1998)
Termessos
from Celestial Bodies (2002)
Mouth-River
Chin Song
Un Messagio per il Corpo
Ideology Stinks, But the Heart Smells Pure
Approaching Fifty
Out for a Walk
Ars Longa
Time is Money
Time and a Dog
Sundog to Moondog
Pluteus Petasatus
Chimaera
Dancing at the Binbir Gece
from Stroke (2007)
No Comfort to be Had
Deep Gossip
Insurance
The Visionary from Apopka
The Body Politic
Time's List of Things to Do
The Vulgate of Experience
Four Tiny Sonnets
Driving to Assos
Hystericalectomy
Drought
Avant-gardening on my weeping knees
Little Pirate Song
Grand Disastery
A Computerized Jet Fountain in the Detroit Metro Airport
from Straits & Narrows (2013)
Animist Manifesto
Boulder
Interlude
Such Luck
In the Mood for Love
Form
Prairie
The Creeps
Wild Raspberry
O
Littoral
Hybrid
Peony
Stuck
Run On
My Istanbul
Geep
from Bird Book (2017)
first green flare
A Bird
Burrowing Owl
Birds
Indigo Bunting
Marsh Poodle
Cardinal
Killdeer Bathing
Whimbrel
Turkey Vultures
Glory Train
Birding at the Hamilton County Phosphate Mines
Bird Words
Loon
Blue
Osprey and Needlefish
Birding at the Dairy
thirty white
The Hard Saving
Notes
Acknowledgments