Praise for Amy Nawrocki’s Four Blue Eggs
From poet Leslie McGrath:
Amy Nawrocki’s poems celebrate preservation and renewal in New England landscapes. Births, deaths, and the whimsical appearance of the mysterious—all are welcomed as the poet invites us to “light the light that will unblind us.” Nawrocki is a deft observer of the beauty of work, be it pickling or pulling a quahog from the muck. The weathered and the wasting, too, are treated with wonder by this poet who describes a bygone farm in which pumpkins in a field are “sitting like children watching a magic show.”
From Lisa Schwartz, Poetry Editor of the Newtowner Magazine:
Like Whitman, Amy Nawrocki gracefully extols the beauty of nature while subtly lamenting our detachment from it. Her elegant writing lends transcendence to our everyday world: a fiddlehead fern “emerges from the clean violin of time;” ritual becomes the light that “unblinds us;” a spinning wheel evokes the threads of destiny. Whether she is writing about swamp cypresses or kitchen sinks, Ms. Nawrocki’s poetry has a quiet intimacy that sings with harmonic magic.
From poet Vivian Shipley:
As if she were a weaver at her loom creating a tapestry of Four Blue Eggs, Amy Nawrocki threads the death of her mother into poems that navigate the tension inherent between the heart and mind created by “the mind’s insufficient wiring.” Written with a lyrical but unsentimental voice, Nawrocki crisscrosses generations by describing tactile memories like peeling parsnips during January while “iglooed” from the cold. Each poem is underpinned with the tenderness Nawrocki displays in a powerful poem, “Threads,” where she keeps the cat from waking her mother while she is choosing a dress for her cremation.
Always sensitive to the natural world, Nawrocki fears raccoons will encounter “tumult of oncoming tires.” What other poet has worried about the cypress that was felled to make red mulch for her azalea? In her struggle to navigate the world and cherish its beauty, in a particularly vivid poem about bees, she observes “What lasts is not the sting….what lasts is the internal honey.” Ultimately, teaching us to “flame into the now,” Four Blue Eggs ignites a candle that the heart and mind can follow.
Four Blue Eggs was a Finalist for the 2013 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize
Released February 7, 2014 by Homebound Publications. Second Edition was released in 2017 (with new cover)
Amy Nawrocki 