Base Camp

The poems in Base Camp take us from the steep slopes of Mt. Everest to the darkness where thirty-three Chilean miners are trapped.   With an insistent empathy born of passion, trauma, and illness, Nolan’s poems reach out to women making their daily trek for water and to an ice-trapped whale, from a medic tending the wounded in the range of fire to an abused three-year-old hiding in shadows. Written with a directness that does not indulge in distracting pyrotechnics of obscurity, these poems invite us “home/to the repository of music: the human heart.”