Imagine finding all of the small objects you’d ever lost fastened to a manhole cover.  In Nancy Walden’s first book, In the Tent Called Amazement, her poem “Allegory” offers this unusual image: They are linked together/ saved, not washed away./  imagine her relief/ to realize every/ part of her life/ is still clasped on, retrievable.

In the poem “Is That a Calliope I Hear?” she places her artistic lens over a homely garbage truck. This poem exemplifies her unique ability to create new realities from old tired ones: The same fine note played at the end/ Of each drive./  Aha!  A train whistle keeping its distance./  Aah!  More broken toys for the Garbage Man’s Circus/ Featuring barking dogs…

Equally engaging are Walden’s poems inspired by works of art, such as “Stone Woman, 1938.”  Here she first offers the image of Meret Oppenheim’s oil painting, but as quickly as she offers it, she replaces it, making the stone figure human: “…Basalt belly/ Granite head/ And only water/ To lap at her middle/ The place of sensation/ Only her legs are flesh…”

In spare, lyric form, this author shares her love equally between the beautiful and the common.  She writes of the natural world with an attention to detail that occasionally becomes surrealistic.  The blurring of humans, inanimate objects, and animals is common in Walden’s work, where the primary difference seems to be that humans are able to reflect on mortality. In the tradition of William Carlos Williams, she finds an endless source for writing poetry in the world of visual art. Her special fondness for Native American and Inuit art stems from seeing an [Inuit] image of a smiling snowy owl in a gallery window years ago. Her brief, breathtaking poems leave the reader with the sensual fullness of having viewed enchanting works of art in a museum. Walden recently graduated from the MFA program at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota with a specialty in creative writing.