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He’s an organist / and she’s a northern // nurse: she mends / the broken / bones of gold // miners / when their sky / falls in.
Eleonore Schönmaier explores three great forests of her life through the lens of experiential environmentalism. Along woodland trails and on the shores of essential bodies of water, she reveals beauty and loss in equal measure in these poems.
Wildlife appears at regular intervals, never when expected. In Schönmaier’s boreal forest childhood, she witnesses human and environmental exploitation and lives a life of labour. In a moment of joy, a canoe transforms into a sled. As she moves into adulthood, music creates a pulse to her life and her poems. In a heatwave, two pianists perform Wasserklavier in a botanical garden. A singer works in the Dutch resistance. A Greek composer creates love songs. An organist rides the rear carrier of a bicycle. Turkish composer Fazıl Say performs his Black Earth.
Goldfinches, blue-winged teals, waterthrushes, blue herons, and flickers inhabit the pages of Rush of Wingspan. The soundscape of these poems is intimate in scale – about nature, art, animals, cycling – chamber music more than opera. Love is the blue-river thread in the warp and weft of the collection. Schönmaier’s focus on planetary and human rights is the red-blood contrast.
“Eleonore Schönmaier’s Rush of Wingspan is a sanctuary of stillness, offering a space for clarity and reflection. Her prismatic poems navigate silence, perception, and memory with a painterly delicacy, encouraging the reader to forge a deeper connection with oneself and the natural world.” J. Mae Barizo, author of Tender Machines
“The rush of a life fully lived, swift and ephemeral. A span from tenderness to brutality, activity to contemplation, nature to art. Though tethered to the witnessed world, Schönmaier’s visionary attention holds these poems aloft.” Stephanie Bolster, author of Long Exposure
“‘If we want / clarity,’ writes Eleonore Schönmaier, ‘we should try casting / a bronze sculpture’ – but ‘her new book suggests another source of rare clarity: reading poetry like hers. In blending spareness and amplitude, memories and immediacy, these poems are among her most riveting ever.” Brian Bartlett, author of The Astonishing Room
“Rush of Wingspan is a stunning collection that distills and details youth’s harsh realities, love’s adult healing, and the natural world enfolding them. Eleonore Schönmaier shows life in all its depths and beauty where ‘light in its fullness / both fades and brightens,’ illuminated by her poetic brilliance.” Kevin Irie, author of The Tantramar Re-Vision