Wood engraving by Barry Moser

It Is July in Virginia
A Poem Sequence
Rara Avis Press, 1985

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Winner of the Gertrude Claytor Award of the Poetry Society of America

"Marcia Falk is a deceptively transparent poet whose work, while meditative and deeply inward, is of a very tough and durable texture. Her contemplations of the external--the natural world--are tropes for psychic states in much the same sense as Dickinson's are. If I were going to try to describe these poems to someone who hadn't read them, I would say that they are expressions of a state of outsiderhood, longing for relationality: someone watching at the edges, unhoused but listening for 'what calls you home.'"
      Adrienne Rich

"I think it extraordinary . . . [It Is] July in Virginia forges new ground. Marcia Falk's signature contribution bears mention: she has a painterly eye and the poems speak from that . . . Issuing from a kind of perceptual heightening at the center of the stillness, her poems seem like glimpses taken out of the time-stream and allowed to shimmer in place. They are odd, still, resonant poems, quite distinctive, at times almost revelatory."
      Heather McHugh