The new century peeled me bone bare like a song inside a warbler - that bird, people, who knows not to go where the sky's stopped. Over the years, Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sure and startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling, Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly peopled with figures from this and parallel worlds - Simone Weil, Verlaine, Nabokov, Eurydice, "the new boys" working in the morgue, and others - No Starling moves beyond a reliance on the dramatic resonance of individual characters. Its vision is deeper, its focus both singular and communal: the self on its journey through the world ("Mouth, mouth: my light / and my exit. Let nothing / block the route"), and our responsibilities as a people for the precarious state of that world. Slate My too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in back sluice right. I was driving with the dead Nance in the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't work so there was an added worry of running out of juice. Her word. Her word one windy evening with the carpets stripped from a floor, which surprised us as stone - slate from the quarry we were headed to now, but Let's first have us some juice, she'd said, then, barefoot on bare slate. The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet, thuds left, clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving, sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottled on my windshield. Thank God, here's the quarry, and there's the high ledge, where, as a girl long ago, she'd stepped bravely from the white towel and stared down. Then she'd held her nose and leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.

In these eight interconnected stories, the idiosyncratic inhabitants of a commune started in the '60s in Washington State share the tales of their quirky lives a generation later, calling into question social order vs. anarchy.