“This Nest, Swift Passerine”
By Dan Beachy-Quick
Tupelo Press, 2009
In this Colorado Book Award nominee, Dan Beachy-Quick (BA English ’95) entwines original and scavenged texts, lyric fragment and lyric song. Language, Beachy-Quick says, is a nest where the minds of poet and reader can dwell. A migratory bird’s nest also offers a place of dwelling in the pauses between astounding miles of flight. A nest is made of both natural and artificial, happenstance materials (grass and twigs, but also grocery lists, threads from clothing, detritus from humans, literally what is found by the side of the road), and likewise the poem in this book has been made from gatherings and improvisations and unexpected opportunities. “Poems,” he says, “are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.”