Nancy L. Davis’ lovely poetry collection, Voices in the Sky, winner of the 2026 Prairie State Poetry Prize, deftly explores the author’s world and nature’s profound presence in it.
The book is divided into three sections. The first, loosely based on the author’s family’s history, explores such topics as wasted talent, a house remembered, her estranged father’s visits and her mother’s death. In the second section, Davis moves outward into the world, deliberating on matters like rain forest destruction and the aftermath to nuclear damage. The final section delves into things of the spirit, art and nature.
Almost all of Davis’ poems are characterized by an abiding love of nature. In many, she sets the natural scene first. Thus, in “Harvest,” she writes “Outside, past the bay window/ a flock of cedar waxwings/ black-masked and yellow-tipped—fell fast/ from saffron blossoms of the tulip tree” before describing events around a funeral. It’s as though nature constitutes so much of her life that natural events (a “forsythia blooming,” a hawk swirling “dead leaves”) carry the same weight as human events. The book is replete with such quietly stunning descriptions as “a mole, blind in its star-starved/ pursuit of light.”
Light—how it can be fractured and shattered and how it changes things— is also a recurrent motif in Davis’ poems. In the collection’s first poem, she writes of “blue shards of light/ refracting stained glass.” Homecoming” begins with the “First glint of dawn.” In “North Country,” she writes about “Brittle glass panes/ glinting silver in noonday/ light…”
Although most of Davis’ poems are well crafted, some are hard to fully understand. “Wash It,” fails to convey what the author is addressing. Is it a person being washed? What does the “blood-soaked, rancid dye” refer to? The poem “2025” isn’t developed enough to project more than a vague feeling.
Such moments aside, Voices in the Sky is a work of beauty, well worth reading.