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Nancy Willard comes out of a poetic tradition that she describes in Testimony of the Invisible Man (1970) as "Ding-poetics," pioneered by Rainer Maria Rilke, William Carlos WILLIAMS, and Pablo Neruda, characterized by the "scrupulous examination of concrete things," and carried on in the DEEP IMAGE poetry of Robert ELY and James WRIGHT. Willard, like Russell EDSON, has taken this careful realism in the fabulist direction of magic realism, often moving ordinary objects from daily household life into the area of the fantastic or the spiritual within the space of one line. "Mercy is whiter than laundry," she writes in "Angels in Winter" (1982). Willard was born in Michigan and educated at the University of Michigan and Stanford. Her 11 books of poetry include Skin of Grace, which won the Devins Award in 1967, and A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, which won the Newbery Award for distinguished contribution to American literature for children in 1982. Her first book, In His Country, was published in 1966. It included what was to become a staple of Willard's collections, a group of poems on a unified theme—here the sculptures of Gustav Vigeland in Frogner Park in Oslo. Household Tales of Moon and Water (1982) contains a sequence, "My Life on the Road with Bread and Water," which combines elements of road saga, domestic drama, and fantasy. Her "Poems from the Sports Page" sequence, in Water Walker (1989), moves from a literal to a spiritual/surreal reading of such headlines as "Foxes Fall to St. Francis," "Giants Meet Reviving Eagles on Monday Night," and "Stars Nip Wings" (see SURREALISM). Other books have been entirely thematic, rather than simply collections of LYRIC POETRY. Nineteen Masks for the Naked Poet (1971) created the persona of a human poet (male) living in a world where one can invite the Moon for supper, enter the sleep of the bees or the eye of the snow, or, as in "The Bakers Wife Tells His Horoscope with Pretzels," have his future revealed by "hundreds of pretzels crossing their arms in prayer." The Ballad of Biddy Early (1987), "the wise woman of Clare," is a cycle of poems about a 19th-century Irishwoman reputed to possess magic powers. Biddy Early recalls the William Butler Yeats of his Crazy Jane poems in its feeling for place and character, its suggestion of a story in discrete lyrics, and even its use of refrains. Willard's is a poetry of continuum. With grace, wit, and close observation, she bridges the distinction between children's and adult literature, between humans and angels, between the literal and the fabulous. BIBLIOGRAPHY Danis, Francine. "Nancy Willard's Domestic Psalms." Modern Poetry Studies 9 (1978): 126-134. Tillinghast, Richard. "Poems of Innocence and Experience." Michigan Quarterly Review 37A (fall 1998): 35-37. |