Overview

The Bonds of Nest and Urn examines the forms and purposes of nature and art, revealing how the artist's vision--sometimes Orphic, sometimes Christian--ultimately unites the two. The spirit moves through number and metaphor, and the volume asks whether poetry can exist apart from history or personality, even though both inevitably remain present. The narrative arc of the poems flows from art to nature, though the two remain deeply intertwined. Many pieces focus on flora and fauna, with birds serving as muses and trees imagined both as objects of artistic perspective and as towering emblems of nature, commanding respect and, at times, fear. Stones are regarded as objects of art, reverence, and scientific inquiry, while the poems draw connections among the four classical elements--fire, air, water, and earth. The volume's richly layered personal and cultural perspectives, informed by the poet's American upbringing and years in Ireland and Italy, offer a nuanced exploration of how nature and culture shape human experience. Readers who appreciate poetry with a vivid sense of place will find much to savor.

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Jefferson Holdridge is Professor of English and Director of WFU Press at Wake Forest University. He is the author of the recent volume of poetry The Wells of Venice (Resource, 2020) as well as the critical work Stepping Through Origins: Nature, Home, and Landscape in Irish Literature (2022).

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