Barbra Nightingale
Poet, Painter, Associate Editor (South Florida Poetry Review), and Jewelry Designer!
Hello and welcome to my website. I’m a published poet with eight books of poetry published by small presses. The latest one, Alphalexia, came out in 2017 with Finishing Line Press. I'm into many different things, as you will see, and have many talents. I'm available for readings, workshops, and Jewelry design parties!
Take a look through my site and let me know what you think!
Story of Barbra Nightingale
A Life in Words
Barbra Nightingale has always been passionate about writing and storytelling. They describe themself as a curious Writer who loves exploring different themes and motifs. As part of their writing process, they love immersing themselves in their projects—diving headfirst into the research, production, and fine-tuning of the stories they feel are the most worthy of telling.
Testimonials
Here's what others are saying about Spells...
Barbra Nightingale's poetry, like her name, sings with life; a true bard who records emotional history though verse-song. Her poems resound with the truths and plenitudes of the human condition.
Richard Blanco, author of How to Love a Country
Barbra Nightingale is full of vulnerability, smarts, and sometimes hilarity in Spells & Other Ways of Flying. She brings her witchy poetry powers to these verses of both difficult and wonderful loves. Her fortuitous last name, perfect for a poet of flight, guides us through a delightful series about birds ending with a ghazal, “A Watch of Nightingales.” Barbra is a poet with a wild imagination and a wild heart and, quite possibly, wings!
Denise Duhamel, author of Second Story
Spells & Other Ways of Flying is a collection of wry and wise poems, as far-flung as they are probing. These poems trace "our various angers;" they honor "the endless rain/ that falls inside [our] heart[s]." By the time our speaker confides in us, "Nothing I ever did was safe, / nothing was ever in vain," we don't just believe her--we applaud.
Julie Marie Wade, author of Skirted
Alphalexia
April, 2017
A crazy romp through the alphabet. Twenty-six letters, twenty-six poems!
"So you thought you knew your A.B.C.s? Not until you read Alphalexia, an imaginative and quantum look at the very atoms of language--the alphabet--through the lens of these expertly crafted poems that are as whimsical and satirical as they are an insightful and meaningful examination of our relationship to the very nature of language."
Praise for Alphalexia
Richard Blanco, U.S. Presidential Inagural Poet, and author of Looking for the Gulf Motel, among others.
Review of Alphalexia
Alphalexia by Barbra Nightingale
Reviewed by Alec Solomita
A chapbook that sings a hymn to every letter in the alphabet is no surprise coming from Barbra Nightingale. Her clever and charming Alphalexia is merely the culmination (so far) of a longstanding interest in the most elemental building blocks of language: letters. Not just in combination but standing alone and having meaning in the way they sound, the way they look, the way they make us imagine. Nightingale’s particular synesthesia was evident early on, most clearly in her Singing in the Key of L, a more traditional production full of her characteristic mixture of playfulness, acute observation, and passion, but also scattered with notions about language, syntax, and the way we frame words — in the poem “Interdental Processes,” the author actually sits us in the dentist’s chair and gets in our mouth:
“The drill whines on and on,
its high-pitched screaming
raising shivers and tooth dust,”
How we suffer in our “parched bid for language,” our need to form vowels and consonants! The titles of the poems, as well, often signal Nightingale’s preoccupation. “The Woman Who Talked Until She Ran Out of Words” and “Proverb: If You Have Nothing Good To Say Then Keep Your Mouth Shut.” And a few them more specifically prefigure Alphalexia, particularly the title poem “Singing in the Key of L”
“It would be no use, they said: you’re tone deaf,
they said, you sing in the key of L.
Lousy, limp, lame, L for sounds like ’ell.”
Alphalexia overflows quite naturally with this sort of alliterative wordplay, often humorous, sometimes a little scary, and occasionally profound. There’s a certain mischievous joy in this surfeit of alliteration – this breaking of one of the current rules of poetry. For instance, the beginning of the poem “H”:
H
“Holy hell, he hiccoughed, how hateful
hypocrites can be, how hermetic
in nature, how homogenously hindsightful.
. . .”
And slipped into the fun is a genuine insight!
Many of the poems begin with an analysis of the visual appearance of the letter, moving soon to some common definitions, then a more personal meditation on various meanings the letter holds. But despite the fairly frequent similarity in form, each poem stands happily on its own.
B
“How round, how buxom!
No wonder bosom begins with B.
Say it aloud, it’s a noun, a verb,
a grade less than perfect.
Observe its curves!
How could it ever be second rate?
. . .”
Sexy, amusing, brash, these poems have many qualities of Nightingale’s earlier work, but quite naturally, fewer soft, heart-stopping lines, which is not to say that she shies away from the wittily serious: “Don’t try to convince me/you’re on the rebound, the rate/of recidivism is astonishing.” And, indeed, the sublime does shine through on occasion, as in the lovely poem “C”, with its nod to Wallace Stevens.
C
“Remember Crispin sailing on an open C?
It is only now, I realize how similar C is to sea,
. . .
The roll and pitch of that arc
a sideways wave hello or goodbye.
Who is to say? When the nights are clear
no clouds hang low, and stars console the moon.
Who waits in chastened corners of darkness?
Who is out there, alone, baying to the sky?
Who could tell a chord from a choral,
a church from a church key?”
And we see entreaties and philosophical moments among these surprisingly disparate verses. “M” starts with mothers and moves smoothly to advice for their sons: “… All boys should memorize:/My mother is a woman./My mother is my friend./Women are my friends.” A more personal bit of neatly phrased philosophical analysis comes in the poem “Q”:
“I’m just another quirk, a tidbit
of humanity, a quarter note, quaking
in the book of life, queued
in line like everyone else.”
Nightingale’s ability to muster up the apt yet startlingly original simile was apparent in her earlier books – “I have listened to the wind tell stories/the trees drop their leaves like applause.” In her poem “Defining the Blues,” she comes up with this persuasive combination: “It is slate blue or pale gray,/and tastes like your first cigarette.” The same holds true in Alphalexia, where her unique reflections on the sexual organs are particularly piquant. “Ever notice how a Portobello/and penis are much the same shape?” The first word in the poem “V”, is, unsurprisingly “Vagina.” “Take away the sex and it’s all/sharp angles; suitable only/for planes and geese.”
The poems in this genuinely unique collection are a pleasure to read and re-read. It’s as if the dictionary were written by a brilliant linguist with the sensibility of the Marx Brothers. Conversational, exuberant, teasing, and challenging, Alphalexia finally convinces the reader that Barbra Nightingale is right – “… words do more/than signify: they mean.”
Geometry of Dreams
2009, Word Tech Editions
I've always tried to write about things I don't understand in order to learn things. This book is about math and men, two things I never did understand very well. I did learn one thing: A lot of terminology!
"Russians speak of poets whose poems they love as having Nightingale Fever. Coincidence noted, Geometry of Dreams is a smart, fiery, original book. Read it and get the fever!""
Thomas Lux
Books still available
Singing in the Key of L
1999
Contact
Get in touch with me for more information about my previous publications and upcoming releases. Or to order books! PLEASE, order books!