Co-winner of the Tupelo Press Editor's Prize in Poetry, "Every Bird is One Bird" explores the intimate and intricate relationships that exist between untamed nature-the world we watch-and inwardness-the world we sense. The poems disclose the unending and essential flow between the two. Fiercely beautiful, they convey an instinctive, emotional involvement that aspires to pure song.
Many of the poems have a prismatic quality and depend on an incremental progression of time and detail. The landscape of northern Minnesota--its shrub swamps and needleleaf forests and grassy fields--is the archetypal and mythic well from which Sterle draws.
She is rooted in her landscape-it is her source and her resource. As she shares her world of lakes and stunted pines, wildlife and wildflowers with us in hauntingly beautiful phrases, she moves softly and swiftly between the grand and the intimate. It claims her as a writer, and us as readers.
