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Waiting for the Trout to Speak Novello Festival Press In Waiting for the Trout to Speak, her second book of poetry, Honeycutt demonstrates clearly her mastery of the art that she has shared so effectively with her students. She builds on her already established reputation for the delicate lyricism of her work. Honeycutt writes simultaneously about the human condition, and the mystery and beauty of the natural world that surrounds us.
Reviews “These are poems full of family feeling. Honeycutt is a survivor who takes her grief and ruminations with her into isolated settings, often into the place where ‘darkness grows inside the dark’; we go with her into a landscape she makes familiar.” “The poems in Irene Blair Honeycutt’s new book, like Wordsworth’s ‘spots of time,’ are finely attuned to Nature’s beauties and terrors, and by extension teach us about the meanings inherent in our own lives. She is a painterly poet, full of sharply realized observations: looking at wolf prints she writes, ‘How soft they are, / floured with snow’; a heron ‘moves like some mythical sage . . . thinking things through.’ We finish Waiting for the Trout to Speak with the sense of having traveled through a deeply satisfying spiritual landscape.” “Accomplished, offering radiant scenes intensely drawn, yet shadowed by an edgy and subtle sense of remembered sorrow and darkness, these poems meditate on family, losses and on the natural world . . . Honeycutt . . . shows an affinity for the solitary that inhabit her landscape—the watchful heron, a wounded turtle, the barking dog in a niece’s poem—and creates a reverberating undersong of the ineffable that haunts the reader long after the pages are closed. An insightful, memorable book. Bravo!” “Honesty and clarity are the prime guarantees of genuine poetry. Irene Blair Honeycutt offers these qualities so naturally in her lines that a reader feels immediately in her personal presence. Fine company she makes too—unhurried, intimate but not confessional, engaged. For all its sorrows, Waiting for the Trout to Speak is a friendly book, cheering to hold and to read.”
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