Red Voice by Nancy Takacs

In Red Voice, Nancy Takacs explores a voice of adventure and wisdom, of finding a way, through rough music and appetite. Her Echo’s breath is stopped by “the wrists of water lilies” and the necessity of the desert landscape that Takacs has lived in and loved for so many years, to reach a place where a lover must promise that “he will not speak until / it improves on silence.”
— Donna J. Long

Nancy Takacs brings Echo back to life in the poems of Red Voice. With lush,
sumptuous, sensual, down to earth imagery, she re-envisions Echo’s myth —
re-imagines how voice, life, self, can be re-sought, re-gained, and brought into alignment, oneness, with Nature, even in the context of this damaged world. From the start, we are drawn in, entangled, enchanted. Here, as throughout the body of her work, Nancy Takacs has a way of making language seem to spill onto the page: her soul, it seems, writes through her.

— Carol Henrikson

Nancy Takacs creates a current of language that carries us through an intense collage of wilderness, praising its bits and pieces—ocotillo, geode, hemlock, abalone, crushed trillium, deer bone, the bear. The voice of Echo thaws unleashing a deluge of imagistic power. Like the bear coming out of hibernation and shaking off its winter muteness, these poems awaken in all of us the mystery and wilderness of language. This book is for every woman who traverses the outdoors and wants her voice to be heard.

— Kate Kingston