Natalie Rice, Nightjar

How I Came to the Eastern Larch

Yes, I lived below.
I drank water, I ate stones. Storms
arrived from the southwest.
There was no damage, 

only the sky was as grey
as the sky over Bruegel’s hunting
dogs cresting a bank of snow. 

Every day, the ocean leapt
forward and back, and I did the same,
in love with a pewter wound— 

bicep seared by a grafting knife.
Meanwhile, winter promised gentleness 

and the house settled into a warmth
that could only come after
a year split by an axe. Rusted 

wetlands carried on below an edge
of skin, blue 

thistle, black rain. Outside
my tiny heart, deer slid
through the larches.

The second full-length poetry title by Natalie Rice, a poet recently relocated to Nova Scotia from Kelowna, British Columbia, is Nightjar (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2025), following her full-length debut, Scorch (Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], a collection I described at the time as having been composed through “a carved hush.” “How to stay with / what was hidden—,” offers Nightjar’s opening five-page poem “The Sea Rose,” “to clutch / hip to hip // with a hole to the heart / until the pitted cliffs / revealed themselves.” There is such a delicate precision to her lyrics, unselfconscious and thoughtfully, carefully set. Rice composes her poems as field notes, as sketches, offering carved lines on movement and landscapes, emerging through trees and farm spaces, turning her lyrics carefully between nimble fingers. As the opening poem continues: “Maybe there’s an ocean / behind the fog, I said / long before // we made new / weather and other forms / of breaking.”

I appreciate the way her lyric speaks from the edge of human occupation, of language, peering deep into the trees and the barrens. “To turn the mountain inside // out and wear it / against the skin. This is now // a love poem,” she writes, in the short piece “Anything May Take the Form of a Cup,” “but there is a town / on the edge of a fossil bed.” Set as a triptych of numbered sections, her poems are sharp, but not overpowering, providing a deep and abiding calm across loss, history and human distance.

In case you weren’t aware, or had forgotten, this is one of the final titles to appear through the original publishers of Gaspereau Press, before heading off into another east coast corner, under the stewardship of Keagan Hawthorne. I am curious to see what might shift, and what might remain.