White Summer Poems by Joelle Biele September 2002 ISBN 0-8093-2468-7, $14.95 paper 64 pages, 6 x 9 Poetry    The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry-First Book Award Jon Tribble, series editor   “White Summer, the first collection from poet Joelle Biele, is a book full of gorgeous language, delicate yet enduring imagery, and a quiet lyric intensity that is far too rare in contemporary poetry. No life detail—a fly, a group of starlings, a festival of dolls—escapes Biele's notice, and we are better for having seen the world through her eyes. Biele's poems, which range from short lyrics to longer meditations, are startling in their clarity, precise in their diction, and deft in their craft. There's a fiercely active imagination on display in White Summer, and a reader cannot help but surrender to these portraits of abundance and beauty. This book is alive in the world, not just merely of it.” —Allison Joseph, author of In Every Seam and Soul Train   “In White Summer, Joelle Biele exhibits a Roethke-like affinity with nature and nature’s creatures. At times a miniaturist, Biele constructs exquisite addresses to a heron, cicada, spider, catalpa tree, mockingbird, snail, cormorant, and others. These pitch-perfect poems are written with a delicate, meticulous attention to craft and music. Like the joy she takes in her subjects, this collection is a joy to read.” —Elizabeth Spires, author of Worldling   “Joelle Biele writes that ‘Some stories will never leave you alone.’ Yet White Summer is blessed rather than obsessed with its stories. The writing itself, for one thing, is so effortlessly achieved, so richly sustained, and so inevitably resolved. Biele fills her poems, she doesn’t burden them, even as she lives in two worlds at once: nature and the present; family and the past—one of which is home, the other exile.” —Stanley Plumly, author of Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New & Selected Poems, 1970–2000     “The ‘sprung rhythms’ of Gerard Manley Hopkins are ghost-glimmerings that spark White Summer’s finely glossed, soul-breathy, delectably lyrical poems, in which Joelle Biele brilliantly explores the fundamental knowing of the Immanence of Nature, and beyond—a bravo debut.” —Wanda Coleman, 2001 National Book Award nominee for Mercurochrome: New Poems   In White Summer, Joelle Biele investigates the problems of personal and cultural memory. Rich with images of flight and displacement, Biele's poems show a love for words, their music and physicality. In lyric addresses, historical meditations, and autobiographical narratives, she takes readers on a journey that includes stops at a dinner party in ancient Rome, a market square in Germany, an Italian feast in the Bronx, and the main concourse of Manhattan’s Grand Central Station. She shows a sharp eye for the telling detail whether she is studying the migrations of birds or sketching portraits of people wishing to escape the confines of their lives. Throughout her first collection, Biele reveals and revels in the power of language to shape and create experience.   A Fulbright scholar and recipient of both the Ruth Lake Award and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, Joelle Biele has been published in the Antioch Review, Hubbub, Indiana Review, the Iowa Review, Meridian, Nimrod, and Epoch. Biele has taught American literature and creative writing at the University of Oldenburg in Germany and has served as a lecturer in the English department at the University of Maryland. To a Group of Starlings   All day you’ve chased the nuthatch, the titmouse, the purple finches in the trees, and now you strut down the street like overgrown boys, raccoon coats hiding your matchstick legs, the sidewalk your grand runway, and you’re boys on newspaper boxes, little drummers playing buckets and pails, shoe-shine men calling, hustlers, shiny watches, the old shell game. Birds of midnight sheen, of oil and ink, of trashcans in the alley, you’re my hard-times bird, my hand’s shadow. You swarm over the roofs like thought before it falls, you shoot from the furnace with the coming rain, dirty stars, faraway flames.