At the heart of this book are sequences that portray some of the central themes of our time: what the Vietnam War took away from us, what the painful reexamination of our loss can give back, and what surprising durability inheres in the sinews of our origins, family, and beliefs. With a fine clarity and precision of language, McFall's thirty-nine poems look back to her pilot-father's death, across her native Floridian landscape, and ahead to her child's birth. At once elegiac and celebratory, highly crafted and full of feeling, they illustrate the restorative powers of art, memory and the natural world.
A native Floridian and Navy junior, Gardner McFall is the author of two books of poems, THE PILOT'S DAUGHTER and RUSSIAN TORTOISE and two children's books, JONATHAN'S CLOUD and NAMING THE ANIMALS. She is also the author of AMELIA: THE LIBRETTO, for the opera AMELIA, scheduled to premiere at Seattle Opera in May 2010 with music by Daron Hagen and story by Stephen Wadsworth. She is the editor of MADE WITH WORDS, a prose miscellany by May Swenson, and the author of the introduction and notes for a Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Kenneth Grahame's THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS. Her poems have appeared in THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, PARIS REVIEW, SEWANEE REVIEW, SOUTHWEST REVIEW, TIN HOUSE, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City and teaches at Hunter College.
