Calling the Creatures

Gunilla Norris has written a book that spans decades of her life. She invites us to wonder what calls us into recollection. It is always a mystery when an inner voice asks for attention. In a long life, that call can be insistent and want a welcome for a vast array of experiences. Gunilla likens this to the calling of farm animals back to the barn after foraging all day which she witnessed in northern Sweden as a child.

Meaningful experiences, be they losses, loves, queries or epiphanies, want sanctuary. If the doors of the heart are open, the recollections can enter again, come back home so to speak and be recognized as the poems of a life.

"Called home, called to love, called to grieve, called to live-calling takes many forms in this stunning collection by Gunilla Norris, whose clarity of voice calls us to a deep listening. Hers is a voice by turns spare, elegant, raw, contemplative, and unfailingly honest. Hers are poems that know we are most urgently called to be human and to live our humanity fully."
-Margaret Gibson, Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut