Overview

In award-winning poet Robin Walter's debut collection, Little Mercy, writing and looking-seeing feelingly-become a practice in radical care. These poems pursue moments of shared recognition, when looking up to see a deer across a stream, or when sunlight passes through wingtip onto palm, the self found in other, the river in vein of wrist. Attuned to the transparent beauty in the natural world, Walter's poems are often glancing observations unspooling down the page, their delicacies belying their powers of profound knowing. The formal logic of this work is the intricate architecture of a nest. Each line becomes a blade of grass, each dash a little twig, each parenthesis a small feather-all woven together deliberately, seemingly fragile but held fast with surprising strength. In their lyric variations, repetitions, and fragments, employed toward a deep attention to wren, river, and reflection, the human almost falls away entirely, a steady and steadying state of being that is unconscious, expansive. Written out of a broken landscape in a broken time, Little Mercy is a book of gratitude, one that draws our inner selves to the present and living world, to the ways we can break and mend.

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9781644453308

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Reviews

""Each poem of Robin Walter's Little Mercy is a precise act of close attention to what more often goes unseen or gets taken for granted in the natural world: the pollen on a single pine needle, the sounds of newly hatched birds (like 'icicles breaking--but brighter, / truer--'). Attention is one definition for prayer, and Little Mercy does indeed seem a breviary of sorts, or perhaps one extended, secular prayer offered up against the damage we humans are capable of--against nature, against each other and ourselves. '[H]ow often, really, I want / to end my life, ' says our speaker at one point, as a casual aside, almost, as if to deflect crisis just a bit longer. But Little Mercy is no trauma narrative; if anything, that narrative is like a stone that's been cast into a deep lake: only the ripples around where it entered the water remain, the way the natural world resonates around our having passed briefly through it. These poems are persuasive testimony to the 'practicing [of] love, then grief' that our lives mostly amount to. If each day that we're still alive on earth is a little mercy, so too is this tender, exciting spell of a debut.""--Carl Phillips, author of Then the War: And Selected Poems

"""Each poem of Robin Walter's Little Mercy is a precise act of close attention to what more often goes unseen or gets taken for granted in the natural world: the pollen on a single pine needle, the sounds of newly hatched birds (like 'icicles breaking--but brighter, / truer--'). Attention is one definition for prayer, and Little Mercy does indeed seem a breviary of sorts, or perhaps one extended, secular prayer offered up against the damage we humans are capable of--against nature, against each other and ourselves. '[H]ow often, really, I want / to end my life, ' says our speaker at one point, as a casual aside, almost, as if to deflect crisis just a bit longer. But Little Mercy is no trauma narrative; if anything, that narrative is like a stone that's been cast into a deep lake: only the ripples around where it entered the water remain, the way the natural world resonates around our having passed briefly through it. These poems are persuasive testimony to the 'practicing [of] love, then grief' that our lives mostly amount to. If each day that we're still alive on earth is a little mercy, so too is this tender, exciting spell of a debut.""--Carl Phillips, author of Then the War: And Selected Poems"

Author Information

Robin Walter is a poet, book artist, and printmaker. Her writing has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She teaches at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

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