Dear Blackbird,

by Jane Springer

The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English.
Dear Blackbird, is the 2006 prize-winning volume selected by this year's judge, J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2007

Reviews

[Elior · Rating 3 out of 5]

Springer's first collection here I'm going to place in the drawer marked "shows good promise". Bit of a cheat really, since I already know her second collection, Murder Ballad is an awesome piece of Southern Gothic. Dear Blackbird, is okay, with some real nice moments, but I feel its emotional impact is lagging its poetic artifice. These poems mostly don't seem very memorable to me. And yes, it starts out with poems about horses. Nicely done poems about horses, but... still.

The second of the four sections in this collection is I think the strongest, and my favorite of the collection is here, Lamentations, a lengthy prose poem about the poet's deceased mother and widowed father.

He speaks of their love this way, exuberant & eternally naked. Which is how she wanted to remember it, too, after she lost use of her legs. & the two divided beds & eventually rooms that seemed to span separate sides of the house, in Tallahassee, Florida. Cancer does not love to sleep, or to share a bed, but wants a room to itself. This is the way

darkness keeps to itself, its own room of disappointments & dreams-

the owl awake, the cock asleep. The morning glory twisting up the telephone pole & closing the purple shades of its many mouths, till daybreak. The phosphorescence tossed on the gulf waves, until the last of the lit shrimp boats have met the dawning shoreline. Night has its own reality, apart from day.

This evocative, and dark, pinning of memory in a specific, and Southern, place location is something Springer will do so very well in Murder Ballad.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book alright, esp An Addict's Guide to Pregnancy, and I hung on through a few horse poems (although as a rule, I'm not big on horse poems).

Since this book sat on our coffee table for a few weeks, the blurb became more and more aggravating: J.D. McClatchy begins his praise by first, strangely, taking shots at other contemporaries: "Most new poetry I read nowadays seems decorous in its austerities or its embellishments: willed, over-plotted, dry." It takes one to know one, McClatchy.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jane Springer is a deep draught of water. Huge lines, huge poems. I enjoy the poems at the beginning, with the blurred line between horse and human. And I love the poems, the big poems, that tell the story of this speaker, her family, her personal history abused and constructed. These are an unstoppable voice, a current pushing a long river.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, I was worried. Part I is all about horses and I just don't love horses that much.

But then Springer's rhythm, tumultuous lines without clear stanzas, caught me up. By the time I got to Part II's "In the Afterlife of Clothes," I was enchanted.

Vibrant and alive. It's a great collection of poems.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, I enjoyed this book. I really enjoyed hearing her read these poems, and her voice comes through strongly in many of the poems. Some are too overly "poetic" for my taste, but many of them are quite lyric and some are talky in the best sense. She has a wicked sense of humor. Lovely!