Innermost Sea by Nancy Dafoe

In Nancy Avery Dafoe’s latest poetry collection, The Innermost Sea, two visions converge; one investigates the world outside us, the other the world within. Dafoe scrutinizes and ruminates, her relentless curiosity steering toward epiphany and naming. Hers is a unifying vision: immensity is recognized in the keenly observed local. Whether it’s a rocky coast or a painful loss, Dafoe’s skillful language, rife with music, tames the overwhelming in poems that lift and sustain us. As well as revealing the amazements of nature, she excels at exploring the domains of painters and their models, and inspires us to rediscover the pleasure of looking hard and long. In her personal narratives, the poet stitches connections to the larger world so adroitly, bells ring inside us.

–Gwynn O’Gara, author of Snake Woman Poems, Fixer-Upper, and Winter at Green Haven

In her latest collection, Nancy Avery Dafoe embarks on a quest to apprehend the outer world’s intriguing dualities (“concrete and abstract,” “possibility and impossibility,” “natural and unnatural”) while at the same time plumbing the mind’s complex “innermost sea.” Guided by memory and buoyed by personal experience, Dafoe’s The Innermost Sea extols twin lifelines: a reader’s enthrallment with literary works and a writer’s wild, storm-tossed act of making art.  Stanza by stanza, Dafoe brings readers ever closer to what she is seeking, that “elusive beauty and truth just beyond reach.”

–Jo Pitkin, author of Rendering