The Nest's Dark Eye

Some traditions believe a grieving woman-given her vulnerability, given the boundless expanse of her sorrow-stands at the spirit world's threshold. Grief gives her a kind of holiness, a sacred compassion and perception. Dianne Stepp's voice possesses such a power. Her poems are finely crafted, deeply musical lamentations for her son who committed suicide. Her poems are grateful paeans to the natural world's bounty and grace. A poet-mother trying to fathom her son's final, devastating actions, she's "craning to see, twisting / to search the shape / of his death." The Nest's Dark Eye offers us sorrow's keen insight, its fraught and luminous beauty.

-Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

In these eighteen arrestingly beautiful poems, Dianne Stepp takes a hard look at our fleeting world, upturning its soil, hunting its truths. Whether hiking or camping, fussing through goods at an estate sale, digging garlic from the backyard garden, or lying in bed alongside her husband, Stepp refuses easy answers to perplexing questions, especially the harrowing one about her absent son. Hard truths, she discovers, are often "hidden in plain sight." "Is this what love is? / Each corm a knot of oily fire," she asks. Yes, each of these terse and penetrating poems answers.

-Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky

In these beautifully crafted, moving poems Dianne Stepp remembers what has been lost through the ravages of time, finding solace in memory itself and in the pulsing life of the natural world.

-Marilyn Sewell, author of In Time's Shadow: Stories About Impermanence.