THOUGH the WARBLER SINGS by Laurie Wilcox-Meyer

Laurie Wilcox-Meyer’s fourth poetry collection, Though the Warbler Sings, is inspired by the contrasting landscapes of southeast Louisiana and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Woven too are familial ties. The collection may reveal itself as sacred activism. Transpose Edward Steichen’s Family of Man into Family of Tree. These poems, a knot on Tree, limn the erasures of nature by human hands. Though grounded in present day concerns, other more transcendent poems address and embrace the more than human world. #poetry #book #nature #family #climate catastrophe

Laurie Wilcox-Meyer’s latest book, Conversation in the Key of Blue, was published by Main Street Rag Publishing, 2020. She lives in the French Broad River basin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where she often spots bears while hiking and meditating about her next poem.

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Spare and contemplative, evocative and transcendent, Laurie Wilcox-Meyer’s poems invite us to consider daily life, dreams, losses, and loves and to hover over each present moment, understanding always that “a greater mystery is at hand, granular and cosmic.” The poet reminds us that beyond the ravenous pulse of time, and the never enough excess of greed, the community of the wild still calls to us, and the whispering buds of the service berry beg us to be kind. In the midst of life and death, losses both environmental and personal, a turtle still can halt traffic, the beauty of a sunflower can stop the stench of road construction, stones can still speak to us, and the trees still call our names. This poet calls us to “live one thousand love songs,” and she warns us fiercely not to explain away her “sips of bliss” regardless of the circumstances.
–Sally Atkins, Ed.D., REAT,REACE Professor Emerita, Appalachian State University Professor of Expressive Arts, The European Graduate School

In poems melding a variety of  East Asian styles in a kind of new and more modern surrealism and showing versatility and focus on nature and family, Laurie Wilcox-Meyer delivers a prognostic punch to the gut of our contemporary complacency in poems like ‘Unleashed’ and ‘Thrash;’ yet is an encouraging voice to how humanity might evolve in poems like ‘Being With.’ Though the Warbler Sings is provocative, if not prophetic. A gemstone in the necklace of the contemporaryAmerican canon.
 –Thomas Rain Crowe, author of The Book of Rocks, (Finishing Line, 2007)

Laurie Wilcox-Meyer’s Though the Warbler Sings is transcendent, wise and perceptive, a collection of brief poems that’s part meditation, part keen-eyed observation, and part awe and wonder at the natural world. She writes about family, fire, love, and loss with an every-present awareness of nature’s nuance, be it on the Louisiana bayou or in the rivers and woods of the North Carolina mountains. Her words remind us, page after page, that the “Earth’s in charge,” offering solace as we navigate temporal waters where “heart, sky, and canoe” are “all one.”
–Gene Hyde, Editor, Appalachian Curator; retired Head of Special Collections, University of North Carolina Asheville