Nick Norwood is the author of the poetry collections The Soft Blare and A Palace for the Heart and the fine press book Wrestle, which he produced in collaboration with the artist and master printer Erika Adams. His poems have appeared widely in such journals as Western Humanities Review, Southwest Review, Paris Review, Wallace Stevens Journal, and others. (Author photo by Chuck Hemard)
Gravel and Hawk charts the emotional landscape of a single extended family, its history of loss and gain, and, especially, its encounters with violent death. It is an eminently readable collection, rooted in a distinctly American place and united by a poetic voice that is honest, sophisticated, and persuasive.
"Gravel and Hawk reads like a superb family album of photographs and videos of memories and dreams. There is a James Agee-like sharpness and alertness of observation in the images of tractors, cattle, Victrolas, boats, ancestors, awakening love. Norwood captures the fleeting insights of adolescence, the humiliations and victories of childhood, and inklings of mortality, in portraits achingly vivid, in riffs spare and honest, bringing the past alive in a fresh idiom."
—Robert Morgan
"Gravel and Hawk has a pervasively appealing genuineness in the fidelity with which Norwood honors, and reflects on, the textures and personalities of his youth in rural Texas. Filled with insights both sweet and dry, this book delivers a rich sense of a past deeply examined."
—Mark Halliday
Ohio University Press
