The world is indeed charged in Sharon J. Ackerman's new collection, A Legacy of Birds. It flames out in image and startling language, clearly kin to Gerard Manley Hopkins' ecstatic nature and devotional poetry. More closely, Ackerman's beautiful work honors her native Appalachia of sweet milk, pleated fields, bluing mountains, tubers and roots dungeoned, pinwheels of trillium, a nightjar's serenade, the family skillet "blood heavy." Her deft call to this world is both blessing and keen; her legacy of memory, still green and young and "born of air," is our gift of grace. -Linda Parsons, author of Valediction: Poems and Prose
The poetry in Sharon Ackerman's A Legacy of Birds is elegant, discreet, and evocative. Her poems are almost whispered because her subjects are tender and easily bruised. There is no brash and bold, no loud insistence. These poems draw you close and present their concerns and quiet passions as an antiquarian or paleontologist might their delicate treasures. Read it slowly and savor. You will be enriched.
-Edison Jennings, author of Intentional Fallacies
In A Legacy of Birds, Sharon Ackerman's luminous poems remind me of what it is to be alive, to be transformed by the trees, birds, rivers, fields of the natural world. Grounded in extraordinary beauty, her poems astonish in their metaphoric flight. "Look to the edge, a gull cries as the story of my life undocks, its hull scraping the beach, its white, white sail visible for a time, then not." Ackerman explores the sacredness of consciousness, as she observes the fauna and flora of an Appalachian landscape. A persimmon tree "that disguises itself as godly things do," or "the lunar eyes of potatoes" in a grandmother's root cellar. In poem after stunning poem, A Legacy of Birds explores the mystery of existence and I too found myself "peering into a dark unknown, finding it iridescent."
-Trudy Hale, editor of Streetlight Magazine
