New from poet Lyn Lifshin: NUTLEY POND

Lyn Lifshin is an amazingly productive poet, and her upstate New York landscape (she's also a Southerner part-time) overlaps on Vermont's -- especially in her new collection, NUTLEY POND. Her recent work has followed the lives of horses she loves; now here's a book that draws the life of the geese on the pond, onto her pages. She's presenting the book via Goose River Press for $12.95 plus shipping (there's also a limited-edition hardcover); details at the press web site, www.gooseriverpress.com.

Here's a bit of the press description:

From winter fields smoldering with light and temperatures falling though spring with geese honking the light back and summer's wind of white rose petals, Lyn Lishin's images, her snapshots and freeze frames, pull you into fall's ruby oaks and the coming blue sack of cold. She chronicles life at the pond, layer by layer, the inner and outer landscapes of this almost hidden refuge where deer and beaver, fox, herons, gulls, geese, mallards and even one of the geese featured in Fly Away Home and Father Goose landed for a few days. Nutley Pond is the only place this one goose appeared again in US after being trained with other motherless geese to follow an ultra lite plane to learn to migrate. Like so much at the pond, this goose, with her silver band and tame approach, was breath taking.

The poems from Nutley Pond will pull you into the last flaming maples and glistening gold fish into the shallows and shadows where stars swim in blue black ripples. You will be wrapped in garnet and turquoise sun rises, goose music and the rustling willows on the walk close to the pond. Experience the beauty and terror as light and dark braid and the birds rustle through leaves while the sound of water is a dark whisper though wet stones and crickets get louder and louder and then, stillness.

AS IF A FEATHER
quilt exploded,
a white you can't
see in the dark
but breathe, a
wind of white
rose petals,
a wave of fog
in the shape of
flying things.
Like radio
voices on
the pillow,
lulling, keeping
what's ragged
and tears at
bay, the geese
pull sky and stars
in thru glass,
are like arms,
coming back
as sound

Copyright © 2008 by Lyn Lifshin

Published by: Goose River Press, 3400 Friendship Rd., Waldoboro, ME 04572-6337. gooseriverpress@roadrunner.com