92 pages, S12.95 paperback, $39.95 hard cover.
Voted among the best books of poetry for Winter 2008 reading by The Monserrat Review Poetry editor, Grace Cavalieri.
TEMPERATURES FALLING
Moon slivers on the
rolling skin of water.
Geese in half light,
armada of feathers.
Wind blows them closer.
One silver band glows.
Their onyx, black flame
in a night fire
IN THE ONE SPACE THAT WASN’T FROZEN
the heron, deep
in pond water,
still as sticks
and then, a sudden
swoop like the
last fruit falling
off a tree into snow.
I happened to see it,
standing near the
window, that flash
of tangerine and
gold in its beak like
a barb of sun, a slice
of guava in colorless
air. It’s been so long
I don’t remember
something I looked for
and wanted to come
came so fast
Reviews and information
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 Lifshin’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.
Review by Hugh Fox
A very interesting development in Lifshin’s whole aesthetic approach here. Very Greinke-like, she almost sounds like a poetry-centered Buddhistic specialist in the naturalistic sciences, capturing all the nuances and details in the away-from-all-cities world of Nutley Pond
Review by Laura Boss, poet and editor of Lips Magazine
If Monet had read Lyn Lifshin’s Nutley Pond, he would have painted it. Lifshin’s lush images of Nutley Pond in all its seasons with its kaleidoscope of images as ” geese float like ghost ships” and “gold fish glow llike opals”– where Lifshin herself observes the flow of fauna and creatures, including the rare discovery of one of the “motherless geese” from “Operation Migration.” And although this book of poems is a different flight from other books of poems by Lifshin, she proves she is as passionate about our natural world as she is about relationships. Nutley Pond is a book that needs to be in every school library from middle school to graduate school if it prides itself on having the best work on our natural environment as well as the best poetry written.