Description: Nature's Olympics offers concise poems about the natural world, including plants, animals, and birds. This book focuses on the flora and fauna of the Midwest. Nature's Olympics has four sections dedicated to the different seasons: summer, autumn, winter, and spring. Poetic forms include haiku, tanka, sonnets, and free verse. The poems in Nature's Olympics concern both wilderness areas and cities and show that the natural world inspires insight into human life. Readers will find the poems accessible.
Brief description: Janet Ruth Heller is president of the Michigan College English Association and has taught literature, creative writing, linguistics, and women's studies. She wrote the poetry books Exodus, Folk Concert: Changing Times, and Traffic Stop and the scholarly book Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama. Fictive Press published Heller's middle-grade chapter book about sibling rivalry, The Passover Surprise. Her children's book about bullying, How the Moon Regained Her Shape, has won four national awards.
Review Quotes: "Janet Ruth Heller captures the brilliance of the natural world--much of which we take for granted--with her clear, sharp imagery and subtle nuance. She reminds us to pay attention from season to season and stop in wonder and awe to both appreciate the complex beauty we are surrounded by and to think about our human connections to those cycles and seasons. An excellent writer of haiku, Heller uses the characteristic juxtaposition and insight in all of these fine poems."
--Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy
"In this collection of quiet poems, it is as if Janet Ruth Heller pulls back her curtains each morning, steps out into the world, and begins recording all that she witnesses. She is paying attention, giving us details others might overlook. . . . With keenly precise vision, Heller ponders those moments in the natural world that cannot be fully held onto but which shouldn't be forgotten."
--Gail Martin, author of Disappearing Queen
"In Nature's Olympics, the lyric and the narrative, experience and observation dance with one another, change partners, recombine. A gravesite, a canoe in a storm, a luncheon unroll as if in real time; a few pages later, in stunning haikus, Heller distills a sickle moon, some finches, a doe to their sharpest lyrical moment, to the purely present. . . . In Nature's Olympics, Janet Ruth Heller claims her poetic place at the intersection of memory and the vivid now."
--Susan Blackwell Ramsey, author of A Mind Like This