Reviews for Without a Field Guide
“The poems in Without a Field Guide are elegant, understated, finely wrought. Nicole Robinson explores trauma with a stunningly deft touch and enormous heart. She has a keen eye for the living world and speaks truth with complexity and compassion.”
Ellen Bass, Author of Indigo
“There is a spine of light which runs through this book, though the poems quite often diverge from one another, from the delicate landscapes of our threatened natural world to the poet’s inner life…”
Dorianne Laux, Author of Only as the Day is Long
“In the tradition of Wordsworth and Rachel Carson, Whitman and Mary Oliver, these poems sing of the natural world, its balance and healing, its roots and leaves, its magnificent great blue heron. I admire their grounded honesty and the sane humility of their voice.”
Joseph Millar, Author of Dark Harvest: New and Selected Poems
“When we are lost, stitched shut, when we are struck, what “leads the heart back,” I see, are bones, potatoes, beans, wings in the freezer, the quivering leaf-flags ants carry up the trunk of a tree. Or no, what leads the heart back is the singing of. Robinson’s voice breaks what’s frozen into an opening. No guide perhaps, but singing all around.”
Kate Northrop, Author of Homewrecker
“This is a book that never flinches from grief, while also helping us glimpse raw, wild, sometimes even raucous redemption everywhere we look.”
Ruth L. Schwartz, Author of Miraculum
“The author writes with a sharp eye and a musical ear—she is just as much at home in the narrative as she is in the lyrical. … A transportive, serenely macabre collection of poems on the afterlife of things.”
Kirkus Reviews
Let go of your longing and listen: silence until the first chirps of a dark-eyed junco.
Sign of waking life, sign of singing what you didn’t know you knew.