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On Location
by Nancy Scott
$9 USD
25 poems/34 pages
ISBN 1-59661-162-6
March Street Press
3413 Wilshire Greensboro NC
Ordering Information:




NANCY SCOTT builds a museum with words and opens doors to readers as
she steps into each canvas. Her artistic acuity, rich voice, and sense
of time and place transform static scenes into sometimes startling,
always inventive tales. A docent without geographic or emotional bounds,
the poet presents a book filled with scope and color.—GAIL FISHMAN GERWIN,                                                                                                                                                                                                                         author of Sugar and Sand,
                                                                                2010 Paterson Poetry Prize finalist

The art works that inspire the poems in NANCY SCOTT's On Location are
points of departure, not destinations. Although attentive to the image
before her, Nancy is too much a poet not to conjure up the prequel or
sequel that dramatizes the scene. What her eye sees, her imagination
enriches.                                                               —JOSEPH LONGINO

In NANCY SCOTT’s collection of ekphrastic poems, On Location, she
locates us inside the canvases that mean the most to her. Those that
reflect her Russian heritage, and other paintings whose figures, colors,
and textures she wants to become part of. “I step onto frigid land,”
this poet writes, “avoid/ fallen limb, twisted vine. / No sound apart/
from thumping in my chest.”                               —THERÉSE HALSCHEID,
                                                                              author of Uncommon Geography


BIO: 

Artist and poet NANCY SCOTT is the author of Down to the Quick (2007)
and One Stands Guard, One Sleeps (2009), both published by Plain View
Press, A Siege of Raptors (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Detours&
Diversions (Main Street Rag, 2011). She is also managing editor of
U. S. 1 Worksheets. Signed copies are available.
(http://www.nancyscott.net)

From the Book:

Along the Riverbank
Yuli Yulievich Klever, oil on canvas, 1918
by Nancy Scott

Clouds high, a few cows grazing, brimming
wheat field edging the pale, languid stream,
which curlicues around green clumps of summer.
Massed behind a weathered timber and daub farmhouse,
the forest, red-hued, as if set ablaze by the midday sun.

Ambling near the bank, the man and boy, straw hats,
pole, and bucket filled with a fine catch from upstream.
Young girl in white dress; perhaps she spots the pair
and runs toward the house to tell her mother,
who, pregnant with a fifth child, stirs boiling linens
over a wood-fired stove. The woman imagines

desperate fish flopping in the bucket, their eyes
wide-open. The thought makes her gag.
There was a time when she begged Uncle Gersh
to let her poke out the eyes. No, little one, he’d said,
it will only bring you unhappiness later in life.

Go quickly, she says to the girl, tell your father
to gut those fish outside and throw the heads to the cats.



 

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