Lantern by Nancy Dickeman

Nancy Dickeman’s beautiful, wondering poems light the borders of the unknowable. They find that boundary again and again—at the edge of the ocean, in the garden under the stars, babies in arms, mourning the war dead, and in memory, crossing into a nuclear reservation where a father worked “hunched over the periodic table” and armed guards “held behind them… a question of life and death.”  These poems touch mystery and our capacity to destroy ourselves. Lantern is quiet, vast, and so moving.

–Kathleen Flenniken, author of Plume and Famous

Nancy Dickeman’s Lantern illuminates the dark shadows of our country’s history with unflinching observation raised to art through her astute and agile lyricism. The poet’s childhood near the Hanford Nuclear Reservation roots her in a wild and raw landscape whose winds “threw dust like flames,” and where no one could see or name “all that was harbored in the drifting clouds.” Her father’s work on the Manhattan project bound the family to the blue hills, the sagebrush and tumbleweeds, the carved banks of the Columbia, the baking roof of the government-built house, and the wind—always the wind—bearing the unknown substances “diffusible as breath.” As this coherently knit volume broadens to take in other generations, other places, Dickeman’s compassionate and searching gaze finds “the scarf/ fluttering in light wind like a flag” in a Pakistani field where a U.S. drone is about to strike, and an Iraqi boy “plummeted from childhood” as his home splits open under bombing. Dickeman brings us to the hard places as a poet who loves humanity and beauty with equal force. Her poems of witness are both elegies and odes as they sing “with things that grow: field tulip, star of Bethlehem,/ the pumpkin blossom with its yellow flutes.” This is gorgeous work, honest and intense, demanding to be widely heard and shared.

–Suzanne Matson, author of The Tree-Sitter and Ultraviolet

Nancy Dickeman‘s poems serve as the arms and voices of silenced masses and destroyed places. Her poems are for spiritual seekers of all traditions and practices. Meditative sections guide readers into healing reframing/redefinition: “I am ready/to drink, to lift the water/from the stream bed,//to stand under the comet’s path/and finish this thirst.” These insights complement her refusal to look away from suffering as in her poem “The Girl in the Field” about “a giant poster set in a Pakistani field of a girl whose parents and brother were killed in a U.S. drone strike:” “her eyes faced straight into solar noon/and the drones’ grey underbellies.” Dickeman writes as a global citizen whose poems are for the ages.

–Scott T. Starbuck, author of Hawk on Wire: Ecopoems, and Carbonfish Blues