Reaching for the Nightingale by Beth Fox

Beth Fox’s provocative poems cover a lot of ground: geographically, from Tennessee to Mexico and back to New England, and, in terms of content and usage, enlisting participants that range from snapping turtles to George Washington Carver. She captures our attention with striking details and devices (in “After the Fourth Reading…” a crossed-out line is a significant part of the poem) and asks the question “Can a biscuit cure a nightmare?” With great imagination and insight, the poet gives us striking ways to look at our human condition, and, like her character Buster, catches phrases only to let them go.

–Bob Demaree is a widely published author who has several collections of poems, including After Labor Day (2017.

Beth Fox’s chapbook impresses me by both its wide scope of topics and styles, and its unpretentious yet profound insight. Twisting together poems from gun control to family history, learning race at school and at home in Tennessee to meditations on language or Covid, Fox ranges from straight narrative to oblique enigma, with a subtle imagination and delicate feeling for words evident everywhere. There are so many delights in this manuscript.
–Brian Evans-Jones is a widely published poet and teacher who was Poet Laureate of the Hampshire, England In 2017, he won the Maureen Egen Writers Award. He publishes learning resources at The Poetry Place.

On one level, these good poems, at once forthright and lyrical, give us a closely observed country life—quotidian, domestic, multigenerational. And to her portraits of home and village life, she brings what Walter Brueggemann calls a “neighborly compassion.” But there is also a politics of care woven throughout Beth Fox’s work that will not shy away from the social consequences of kindness and cruelty that shape our personal and communal histories. “It doesn’t help to know that some are okay,” says the speaker in the first section of Reaching for the Nightingale. That some are not haunts every poem in this collection.

–Kimberly Cloutier Green, past poet-laureate of Portsmouth, NH and author of The Next Hunger.