Little Mercy: Poems

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

"Little Mercy is an unflustered, exquisite debut that declares in one of its many strong, sure lines that seem truest in their calm unfolding: 'Still, the day opens.' The whole book is a series of constant, further, and deeper openings, twigs under stillness and rivers under skin."--Poetry Northwest

"The poems are lyrical and stunning in their imagery and tone...it will serve many, as wise books often do, as a guide they weren't aware they needed."--Sara Verstynen, Booklist

"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

"The problem with poetry, whether on the page or out loud, is a problem of space and time. Most often, poems on the page use space but not time, and poems spoken aloud use time but not space. The poems of Little Mercy solve the problem. When the reader encounters these poems on the page, time unfolds (and refolds, enfolds, foals, and foils) in their arrangements, and when the reader recites these poems, one can feel space bending and waning, waging their own little mercies aloud. Such music. Robin Walter sings."--Kazim Ali, author of The Voice of Sheila Chandra

"The scenery of Colorado comes alive on the page: chickadees sing, honeybees flit, lilies blossom. Walter's delicate poems hold the reader close and extol the beauty of the natural world."--Skylar Miklus, Electric Literature

Author Bio

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.