Rock Worn by Water

In Rock Worn by Water, Florence Dacey is smooth. Her lines flow like the waters and winds she calls up in these poems. Her images slip sharp into our breath: a sandpiper's wings carry "sighs of wind under feather." Florence Dacey writes powerfully from within that space for reflection that writers don't find until they have truly matured. The book records the search for a balance of head, heart, and womb, "to ease their old quarrel." She insists that we not turn away from dying rivers, deformed frogs, all our carried grieving. But, she says, "I have young breezes in my old blood." She implores us to "Lie down by the sea... until the water in us/ begins a small conversation/ with the waves." This collection is remarkable for its celebration of the wild as it still exists, even as we suffer its peril. From her deep nature, wide as prairie, Florence Dacey offers us these fine poems of witness and resurgence from grief.

John Caddy, author of With Mouths Open Wide: New & Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2008) In this book live the rich and sensuous poems of a woman who has lived long and passionately upon the earth, a woman who faces her aging with honesty and grace and a Buddha-like acceptance, who knows the importance of giving herself over to the natural world. "Lie down on the rich layers of sedge," she tells us. She is fearless in her acceptance of aging and death, going toward both, not with sadness, but with amazement at what lies ahead: "Soon, soon you will feed only on delight." Here in her luminous book of poems, we are given the good news that although the world is besmirched with our own greedy wastefulness, we can still walk along with her and her wise old dog Maynard into the "perfect" corn. We can even follow her into a public information meeting on the burning of PCBs at a power plant in Granite Falls, Minnesota, where she reads her poem The Grandmothers into the record. This is a poet who not only loves her natural environment but takes political action to save it through her poetry.

Phebe Hanson, author of Why Still Dance With her keen, intimate sight, Florence Dacey welcomes us as relatives of the natural world, inviting us to melt into the ecstasy of intense beauty and rise in urgency to defend the health of our earth family.

Sandy Spieler, Artistic Director, In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre