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From Darren Morris, book reviewer for Style Weekly, 2006:
“Be careful when reading Ornithologies by Joshua Poteat. His poems are so mysterious, eloquent and downright powerful, they may ruin you with beauty. Good poetry calls attention to what would otherwise be overlooked, but the best poetry changes us. Poteat’s poems succeed in showing us ‘what it means to be/honey in a tobacco pouch, the skin of God in a firefly’s gut.’
“Because existence is uncertain, his narrators relentlessly name the knowable world, as if cataloging can protect us against our own disappearance. He brings us closer, not merely through a rich inventiveness, but through the narrative position itself, which is reverent of all it observes.
“In ‘Nocturne: For the Night Workers of the South,’ he is a night watchman at an asylum, where ‘when it rained,/spotted-moth larva would tunnel from the wet plaster ceilings/and drink the patient’s ears.’ In ‘Our Memory, the Shining Leaves (Waterford Fair Civil War Reenactment),’ while watching a faux battle, he focuses on a boy who ‘searches the field after the skirmish/looking for a trace of what he saw (gold button: hank of hair:/glass eye in a raven’s mouth).’
“This is not a poet who needs a soapbox, but one who begs a small and gentle witness to the largest questions of existence. And his world is our world — built on a type of loss that the South can ‘understand: each thing is of itself./Each thing is its end.’ The poems in Ornithologies deserve a national audience. Read them to discover why.”
From Adam Day, Editor,Washington Square/New York University
“Poteat won the 2004 Poetry Society of American chapbook contest, which resulted in the publication of his wonderful chapbook, Meditations. It's interesting now to see many of the poems from Meditations, a number of his other poems previously published at Blackbird.com, all together, situated among the other poems. In the new, broader context of Ornithologies, it's like seeing all of these poems almost entirely anew. This says something important about the poetry's ability to endure, its staying power, and about the quality and import of their content.
“There is a kind of grandness and yet, a muscular fragility to the writing in Ornithologies, and it's a beautiful book, physically, and in content. The poems here are full and lush, and have certainly found their form and are comfortable in their bodies. There is a striking balance between the sonics, imagery and narrative, so that we are absorbed by the poems, leaving the waking world behind. The physical and spiritual worlds quietly collide in these poems, and what might seem far removed from the everyday life is brought to bear, which is to say that to read these poems is not simply an emotive, or reminiscent experience, but one that spurs one to thought. This may seem a statement to be applied to most poetry, but indeed it is the exception rather than the rule. Jarrell could have been speaking of Ornithologies when he said of Paterson, ‘The subject of Paterson is: How can you tell the truth about things?-that is, how can you find a language so close to the world that the world can be represented and understood in it?’
“Not to overstate it, but at a time when one cannot help but feel that poets are publishing too much, too often, and that so much of that work is tragically average and often unimportant, Poteat's Ornithologies feels significantly relevant to the reader's world, and thematically, rhetorically, imagistically, and otherwise substantial.”
From Pimone Triplet, judge for American Literary Review’s Poetry Award, 2003:
“ ‘Elegy for an Elegy Under the Broken Oaks of Maysville’ is a voiced-up and vividly imaginative conceit, in which the personification of elegy itself becomes a player in its own exile and return to the rural community at hand. There are many riches here: from the tender accuracy of landscape description to the poet’s own rhythmic adeptness of stanza and line. What I admire most are the poem’s turns and transformations, starting with the bravado of direct address, yet progressing, as the speaker grows more and more deeply implicated, toward loss and the hard recognition of solace in language and song.”
From David Lee, judge of Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award, 2001:
“I loved reading these poems. They set themselves apart by use of language and the “call back” factor: I’ve read them every morning—at least once—for a week and I’ve never stopped enjoying them. I trust these speakers—these poems aren’t a request to indulge Narcissus. The speakers are intelligent human beings who explore seminal moments, epiphanies in the human experience. And finally, they have what I call the Antaeus factor: they’re rooted in the earth.”
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