Recalling Nancy Willard
June 26, 1936 – February 19, 2017)
I am deeply sad to note the death of my old friend Nancy Willard on February 19th of this year. I reviewed her first book of poems in an essay titled, ”Of Laureates and Lovers,” published in The Saturday Review, l:41, October 14, 1967. I thought that it was a fine first book, and she went on to write many more. When eventually we met, we liked each other, and we were friends until she left us this month. This is the review I wrote:
Nancy Willard's collection of poems, In His Country (1966), volume four of the Generation New Poets Series of Ann Arbor, is a fine first book. Ms. Willard has a mind that likes to tangle strange but relevant ideas in the skein of language, as in the first stanza of "Picture Puzzles":
It's because we're broken
that we love
puzzles; pictures
cut all askew, fifteen hundred
pieces, salvage
of divine catastrophe.
For two dollars my mother
buys, in good fait,
Fra Angelico's Nativity,
incredibly cracked,
sung
like God's defense
on a skeptic's tongue.
And then she unravels the strands gracefully in the dénouement. "See?" she seems to say, "This is where we were heading all the time. Everything makes sense at last."
Well, perhaps not everything, but Ms. Willard is capable of making us think so while she is performing, and that's half of art. The other half is perhaps indefinable, but one might bet she has that as well. This much is sure: Nancy Willard can build a whole poem, an unusual talent in this era of fragments and fragmented poets.
— Lewis Turco