The Swiftness of Crows

From the back cover:

“In this fine collection, Nancy Wall vividly captures the rich pageantry of India. An astute and compassionate witness, Wall reveals both the minutiae of her experiences – a cobra’s cremation, encounters with a a stray dog and a young leper, a visit to a bangle shop – and larger dramas: school girls whose political protest becomes a rite of passage to womanhood, and ‘the swiftness of crows,’ who come to symbolize the brusque, inevitable cycles of life and death.

These keenly rendered poems revel in quiet or charged particulars which illumine deeper themes of human loss, impermanence, survival, and strength; they reverberate with the myriad voices, smells, and sounds of India, and they come to terms with the small splendors and looming fears that paradoxically enrich the poet’s life at home on this continent.”    – Maurya Simon

Published 1999