The Unfolding by Nancy Sobanik

Though the title of this chapbook – taken from the title of the first poem that greets us – would seem to imply quietude, these poems are anything but hushed. Indeed, like the calyx protecting its delicacy of budding petals, the speaker’s words move across this collection like sunlight dappled through leaves – light and dark, both the force of a wave hitting the shore and the softness of its ebb caressing your ankles. Sobanik’s love for the world outside our door is infectious, her language lush and lyric, making both the heron in flight and the heron doing what it does to survive beautiful. That’s the crux of this wonderfully arranged collection – the unabashed acknowledgment of what undergirds any perennial way of being and how, after any loss, we can slowly but surely learn how to be again.

–Gus Peterson, author of Male Pattern

The Unfolding is a book of renewal. Among its many marvelous metaphors—and they are indeed marvels!—one that recurs involves branches torn from their tree, breakage brought on by a harsh father, or the trauma of war, and the finality of death. But slowly that image morphs from brokenness to burl, a wound transformed into something precious. For Nancy Sobanik the natural world is the opening for that transformation, and her astute attention is a gift to us all. As these poems unfold, they reveal how the sacred and profane, wonder and pain, are wound together, neither one replacing the other, but creating space between them for “the alchemy of the moment” –the moment when grief’s caution gives way to a new clamorous tide. This poet’s love for language and her emotional wisdom have created a beautiful, compelling book.

–Betsy Sholl