Separate Flights

Winner of the 2015 Anita Claire Scharf Award
Many of the poems in Separate Flights are about perspective: a child’s view of her neighborhood from the shifting altitudes of a small plane, the dying Keats looking out his window at life going on without him, a deadly hot air balloon crash that appears beautiful to a passenger flying far above it, Monet in his garden continuing to paint the willows within earshot of the German guns. In these poems birds appear both as part of nature and as messengers: the heron flying over a sick woman’s house, the goldfinch arriving as unexpectedly as an idea, the owl nesting in winter and calling forth spring. Whether their focus is nature or human consciousness, the poems in Separate Flights pay attention to the ways in which angle of vision alters our perceptions of the world.