Rock Tree Bird - by Twyla M Hansen (Paperback)

About the Book

This collection of poems by the State Poet of Nebraska covers significant emotional territory while remaining firmly grounded in the landscape.

Book Synopsis

2018 Nebraska Book Award
​2018 WILLA Literary Award

This collection of poems by the former State Poet of Nebraska covers significant emotional territory while remaining firmly grounded in the landscape. From memories of the isolation and beauty of growing up on a farm, to a burgeoning awareness as a teenager of the economic and cultural forces waged against family farming, to coming to terms with the legacies of her parents after their passing, and, finally, arriving at an appreciation of nature and the environment wherever and whenever she finds it, Twyla M. Hansen offers poems that are alternately sad, sweet, funny, moving, human, and humane.

Review Quotes

"Against 'the day's news, ' Nebraska state poet Twyla Hansen tells a story of childhood on a homestead where 'It was miles to anywhere and the center of our universe.' Yet it is with her mother's dying that this reader is most moved: love for the land, the sunrise, all ever present in each poem here, for life. Through poems that speak of local richness, wildlife, and stars, Hansen builds her new book."--Hilda Raz, author of All Odd and Splendid


"The moving interplay of soaring lyric and sure-footed story telling in Twyla Hansen's Rock Tree Bird transcends the Nebraska farms, plains, and rivers, to illuminate her vision beyond regionalism to touch the universal. This collection establishes Hansen as a poet who employs her grasp of the deep map of her home places to speak to the world that explores an impressive range of carefully thought material and poetic style. This collection firmly places Hansen in the company of world poets."--Drucilla Wall, author of The Geese at the Gates


"Twyla Hansen's Rock Tree Bird is the poetry of an agriculturalist, a lover of soil and plants, of Great Plains waterways and skies, of the tiniest creatures in our grasses and soils and the largest turnings of our stars and cosmos. In this book, she sings of her parents and their deaths, of metamorphoses in the natural and human world and of our searches for a stable center, the human search for meaning in the quotidian. In her last section, she seeks for the sacredness deep down in things without religious cliché 'Oh christ! Your body broken, eaten, /your blood shed over this land. /Forgive us for not remembering, /Before it is too late, teach us how/To love our one and only earth.' The poetry of place may be poetry of memory, of perception, or of vision. Hansen's work in this book is the poetry of all three, from memory of farm and family and death in an almost-lost Nebraska to perception of everything in that Nebraska that inspires awe from spider webs and cricket presences to moon movements or 'gods' in the stars and planets, and, finally, to visions of the sacred that come in the presence of the mindful seeing of daily things. This is great work."--Paul A. Olson, professor emeritus of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

About the Author

Twyla Hansen's latest book is ROCK TREE BIRD (The Backwaters Press, 2017). Her book DIRT SONGS: A PLAINS DUET (The Backwaters Press, 2011), written with rancher-writer Linda Hasselstrom, won the 2012 Nebraska Book Award in poetry, and was a finalist for the Willa Literary Award and High Plains Book Award. She has five previous books, including POTATO SOUP (The Backwaters Press, 2003), which won a 2004 Nebraska Book Award. Her writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Prairie Fire newspaper, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Ascent, Natural Bridge, Organization & Environment, Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry (Backwaters Press 2007), Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (University of Nebraska Press, 2004), Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), Poets Against the War (Nation Books, 2003), and A Contemporary Reader for Creative Writing (Harcourt Brace, 1994). Her BS and MA are from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was raised in northeast Nebraska on land her grandparents farmed in the late 1800s as immigrants from Denmark. She is a creative writing presenter through the Nebraska Humanities Council, and lives and works in Lincoln, where her wooded acre is maintained as an urban wildlife habitat, recognized by the 1994 Mayor's Landscape Conservation Award.