How Far Is Ordinary
My poetry collection, How Far Is Ordinary, came out in March 2007. Below are some of the reviews of the book.
Reviews..."For Powell, the struggle toward light is a circuitous route with her protagonist ultimately prevailing. How Far is Ordinary answers its own question. The journey is extraordinary and Powell’s ability to convey it, a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit."
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In How Far Is Ordinary? Nancy Powell takes us on a sensual, visual, and emotional journey that speaks to us of abuse, aging and death, promises abandoned, and a mother’s angst. No matter how dark, her landscapes are woven with a wry hope as exemplified in these lines from “A Place Apart” — I mourned like the dove singing itself into the world again, tasting the trickle of dew, and willed myself to walk in the daylight.
Contrary to any claims to the contrary, poetry's first country and territory embraces everything familiar and close at hand-- even if its cities and towns are Ordinary. Czeslaw Milosz once asked what it is we do, or seek, when we make poems: "Out of reluctant matter / What can be gathered? / Nothing, beauty at best." Hampton Roads poet Nancy Powell's first collection scours the shells of oranges and discarded nuts, considers the question of lucidity in the aftermath of violence, and inhabits "the space between lines" in familiar Virginia settings; doing so, she follows in the tradition of poems that struggle to be made, because the very act of their making embodies the larger human struggle against nothingness.
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Luisa A. Igloria, Award-winning poet,
