Word: quetzal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...restatement of the obvious; an elephant may push an E, but what is that long-tailed bird perched atop the Q? What kind of fish are swimming in the water trapped by the upper part of the X? What is that spotted amphibian sliding down the N? Answers: a quetzal; an X-ray fish; a newt...
...Resplendent Quetzal," a couple's sole reason for getting married slips out from under them when their baby is stillborn. Each would like to have another baby, but the husband is afraid to ask, and the wife cannot transcend the anger she projects on him and her own guilt at the loss of the child. Instead they go to Mexico where she exploits his love of ornithology and sends him off chasing her imaginary birds, while he fantasizes about pushing her into the Aztec Sacrificial Well...
...name instead of trying to reduce an ocean of meaning to an eyedropper. In "Clarence," she follows the thread of landscape as it spins out from the names of places. A Mayan hieroglyph means "sky", but not only sky-in the Guatemalan sky there also fly-or flew-quetzal birds, the source of ancient Indian folklore and mystery. Nye brings the bird naturally into her sky. She traces the connotations of each image down through the rest of the poem, so that the forward motion is the ideas rolling ahead on their own, not a poet who hovers...
...larger concepts. When she tries to move too quickly, the poems end anticlimactically, with a four or five line closing. Always, the message is that there is something bigger at the end of the reverie than what was there before, whether the poem started with rock or man or quetzal. It's easy to get carried away when dealing with large topics, and in Nye's recent collection, she falls into many of the pitfalls. But at least she hugs the jukebox...