Song of the Overcast by Beverly Voigt

Song of the Overcast is Beverly Voigt’s second chapbook. It is a stunning collection of fully realized, well-wrought poetry that gives the reader a sense that the poet is speaking with us. Many of her poems feel like discoveries and mysteries unfolding. Voigt’s keen and lucid attention to the natural world is remarkable and, pairing that with her narratives about family, makes for a surprising and wonderous mix of the lyric narrative. In her poem “The Unfinished Nest: “And we were a clutch of nine small worlds / sky-blue, dappled little things with feathers.” Voigt’s writing is serene and wise and profoundly personal, consistently light, delivered oftentimes in couplets, which gives the reader time to breathe, to appreciate these poems filled with joy and sorrow, longing and letting go: “The puncture wounds where love leeches out / The possible holes in my future. Though I fear these spaces, / they have allowed in light….” Voigt’s voice is intentional and uncomplicated. Tenderness is the adjective I refer to when reading her work, but she’s always in command. Each line can stand on its own. One of my favorite poems in this collection is “That Autumn in Pennsylvania.” From the first line this speaker pulls us in with the discovery: “Little has given me so much joy / as to walk quietly into that field of horses….” And truly reminiscent of James Wright’s poem, “A Blessing,” Voigt ends this poem with the gorgeous: “I feel the weight of her. Such large love / so late in the year.” After reading this collection I was struck by Voigt’s adoration of the natural world, and its sounds: “I sing / the mourning dove’s song of the overcast. / Soft bleat, mild wail. There is no heaven / like that song.” To quote Mark Doty: “… everything here has been transformed into feeling….”  There’s a benevolence about Voigt’s work. Read it. Enjoy the world through her eyes.

–Carine Topal, author of In Order of Disappearance

The lyric poems in Beverly Voigt’s Song of the Overcast invite us to pause our frenzied actions and breathe in the world—“the goldenrods” like “smoldering gods”; “the moon’s dream of itself in a nightdress”; “grasses beginning to lie down.” The voice is deceptively gentle, but proves to be stringent in its observations, its quiet demand that we really look through Voigt’s astute and singular gaze. In their careful and unflinching seeing, these poems remake the world.

–Terry Wolverton, Ruin Porn

Beverly Voigt is a West Coast Rilke or Hopkins, a contemplative of nature and the remembered landscapes of the past. Song of the Overcast is a chaplet of textured poems that seek hope within lament and elegy like marrow within bone. Here, tenderness and stark truth coexist in a balance that yields “words written in a needle’s eye, poems / on a fishhook, curved to the metal.” To be a mourning dove, to sing the mourning dove’s “song of the overcast,” proves to be a worthy aspiration in this fine collection of poems.

–Ellen McGrath Smith, author of Scatter, Feed and Nobody’s Jackknife