Middle Creek
Publishing & Audio

A Wild Silence is an excellent collection of quality poems. Noland's depth of relationship to the natural world, and mindfulness to how the external world mirrors our internal world is apparent in his work. This is a collection celebrating the flora and fauna from which we have risen and co-evolved, a collection which celebrates most especially, the beauty and magic of birds and their relation to our heart, our healing, and our hope, such as this excerpt from An Apprentice of Sparrows:                                  
 

 

                                I watched
                                and waited,
                                tried
                                to be
                                an apprentice

                                to those sparrows

                                who bundle
                                within themselves
                                songs of beginnings,
                                who believe
                                their joy
                                builds a world
                                note
                                by note. 

 

 

 

About the Author

 

John Noland lives and writes near the ocean in Coos Bay, Oregon.  He has published in Chicago Review, Orion, Nature Writing 1999 ed. by John Murray, Georgetown Review, Seattle Review, Laurel Review, Poet Lore, Limestone, Big Muddy, Camas, Intricate Homelands, and other journals.  His chapbook, This Dark Land Where I Live, won Kulupi Press’ 2005 Poems of Place contest.  The Caged and the Dying, won the Gribble Press 2012 Chapbook contest. In 2014 Midwestern Trees and Shadows was published by Finishing Line Press and That Dark and Other Light in 2015.