The Wreck of Birds

In The Wreck of Birds, the first winner of Bauhan Publishing’s May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, Rebecca Givens Rolland
embraces an assimilation of internal feeling and thought with circumstances of the natural world and the conflicts and triumphs of our human endeavors. Here, we discover a language that seeks to at once replicate and transcend experiences of loss and disaster, and together with the poet “we hope that such bold fates will not forget us.” Even at the speaker’s most vulnerable moments, when “Each word we’d spoken / scowls back, mirrored in barrels of wind” these personal poems insist on renewal.  With daring honesty and formal skill, The Wreck of Birds achieves a revelatory otherness—what Keats called the “soul-making task” of poetry.