Naila Moreira‘s chapbook Water Street (FLP 2017) has been selected by the New England Poetry Club as co-winner of the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize by contest judge Krysten Hill. Set at an old farmhouse apartment by the Mill River, the poems of Water Street explore the tension between freedom and domesticity. “In these urgently engaged poems, the natural world serves as witness and accomplice, muse and mirror, companion and liberator,” wrote poet Deborah Gorlin, in a “quest for profound experiences nothing short of cosmic.”
http://www.nepoetryclub.org/contest-winners-reading-sunday-october-14th-2-pm-yenching-library/
Naila Moreira is a natural born pantheist. Her day job is writing articles on sustainability of the environment and her poetry is reflexively in love with the earth. The health and sickness of our souls is held tenderly in this lover’s touch. There is no digging out of meaning: it is there if we are able to see it: our “high journeys” will take us “Pole to pole, senseless and invincible, great arcs, like the travelings of the stars.” A fine book with more love than pain and pain held lovingly.
–Doug Anderson, poet, author of The Moon Reflected Fire (1994), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (2000), the memoir Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery (2000), and Horse Medicine (2015).
In these urgently engaged poems, the natural world serves as witness and accomplice, muse and mirror, companion and liberator. Hearth and home chafe against wildness, habitats of freedom and promise and untrammeled exploration. Domesticity and desire duke it out in the poet’s quest for profound experiences nothing short of cosmic. By the end of the book, the drama calms, and opposites reconcile, as the poet puts her faith in the instinctive wisdom, mystery and contradictions of the heart, “a dark water that shines.”
–Deborah Gorlin, poet, author of Life of the Garment (2014), winner of the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, and Bodily Course (1996), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, and poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.
Naila –
“Naila Moreira is a natural born pantheist. Her day job is writing articles on sustainability of the environment and her poetry is reflexively in love with the earth. The health and sickness of our souls is held tenderly in this lover’s touch. There is no digging out of meaning: it is there if we are able to see it: our “high journeys” will take us “Pole to pole, senseless and invincible, great arcs, like the travelings of the stars.” A fine book with more love than pain and pain held lovingly.”
-Doug Anderson, author of “The Moon Reflected Fire,” “Horse Medicine” and other books
Naila Moreira is a writer, journalist, and naturalist whose work often focuses on the natural world. Her 2014 poetry chapbook Gorgeous Infidelities was published as an art book in collaboration with photographer Paul Ickovic. She has written for the Boston Globe, Seattle Times, Science News and Detroit Free Press, appeared in literary magazines including The Cape Rock, Pirene’s Fountain and the Naugatuck River Review, and contributes a monthly environment column to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. She teaches at Smith College with a focus on science and nature writing and is currently writer in residence at the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts.
http://www.nailamoreira.com