Dolores Hayden

David Robert Books, 2010

Dolores Hayden's precise gaze and chiselled language authoritatively convey her broad and deep knowledge. Whether the subject is fly fishing, ideal communities in the nineteenth century, or how (once upon a time) to fold the New York Times, Nymph, Dun, and Spinner is infused with restrained but piercing emotion, especially in the beautiful poems that invest objects with elegiac eloquence.

--Rachel Hadas

Nymph, Dun, and Spinner is an extraordinary book, the finest poems thus far from Dolores Hayden. Vast curiosity and knowledge of natural and urban worlds sparkle in these poems, the life of the mind bristling fiercely. These qualities are yoked with solemn, deep feeling. The images here are so precisely observed that we are led to revelation in poem after poem. Hayden explores knowing itself as well as the paradoxes of unlearning and then learning anew when life’s circumstances force us out of the familiar. We also understand in these poems how brightly the personal and historical past can burn in the present. The active intellectual quest of each of these poems is inseparable from their deep currents of emotion. This is a pristine and radiant book of poems, each line sharp, clear, beautiful, and wise.
--Elizabeth Alexander