THE DOMINION OF LIGHTS is her first book of poetry.
Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about it:

"Like the Impressionist concern for capturing light rather than the things lit,
Nathaniel's focus is often the elusive, intangible background of individual experience,
the moods and emotions that light or shade the elemental present. Grief and longing --
for a dead son, for wishes past reaching -- hang atmospheric in many poems. In 'Lost
in the Forest Near Nacogdoches,' the narrator observes berries being carried by a trail
of ants across the forest floor. 'Are they not like/ sorrows we have accumulated/ in this
life, each a luminary/ which we must carry with us/ ... more carefully than a piece of
luck?' In some poems, Nathaniel remains so aloof, and her intentions so encoded, that
the reader can't help but feel a trespasser in emotional territory too private to be fully
disclosed. She is most successful when she balances her offstage, private concerns
with a particularity of foreground. When she casts her perceptive eye on her surroundings,
particularly the various Texas settings, Nathaniel's poetry comes alive. In 'Sick at the Gulf' and 'The Coast of Texas,' both of which juxtapose the tumult in the speaker's ailing body with the tumult of landscape and history, she strikes strong chords on the taut, vibrating strings that link her to the wider world." (June 3, 1996)

And here's what Dallas poet-critic Gordon Hilgers had to say in The Word.

Now, here are some quotes from the back cover of the book:

"For years Isabel Nathaniel has been winning prizes for her poems, and now she has produced a first book which will be prized for its confident voice and consummate skill. In poem after poem she entwines high culture and eros, autobiography and history, the ghostly and the lively. While her poems are celebratory, there also is tragedy -- but her art transcends sorrow in affirmative works that are both clear and true."
-- Robert Phillips

"With the aura of sacred ritual, Isabel Nathaniel's The Dominion of Lights enacts loving transformations in the fullness of a beautiful privacy. She writes as Degas said he painted -- not to show us thethings she saw, but the things that will make us see what she saw so deeply. Her service is completed with such a powerfully elevating humility and grace, it effects the promise of fine wine, to make the higher spirit within us shimmer."
-- Jack Myers

"How difficult it is to entice the restive heart to the comforts of domesticity, and to mortgage it to the losses we thereby brave! Isabel Nathaniel's The Dominion of Lights is no narrative, and some of its most wrenching moments (the death of a son) happen off stage, but her quiet, authoritative poems embody, one by shapely one, the act of continuous imagination that embraces the wildness and terror of domestic life as well as its balms."
-- William Matthews

(More notes from the back cover)

"Isabel Nathaniel was born and brought up in New York City. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines, including Poetry, The Nation, Field, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Among her many honors are a Discovery/The Nation Prize and the Robert H. Winner Award, Gertrude B. Claytor Award, and two Cecil Hemley Awards from the Poetry Society of America. She lives with her husband in Dallas."

$9.95   Copper Beech Press 

THE DOMINION OF LIGHTS ($9.95) by Isabel Nathaniel
and GENERATIONS ($25) by Bryan Woolley
are available at Paperbacks Plus in Lakewood.
Call (214) 827-4860 to order by phone.
MasterCard, VISA, American Express, and Discover accepted.
$3.50 postage and handling fee (minimum) for mail orders.
To order online use above link (by title & cover graphic).

Cover: René Magritte, Empire of Light II --1950.
Oil on canvas, 31x39". The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of D. and J. de Menil.
Photograph (copyright 1996) by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Since Isabel is in New York as of this writing and not here to consult about the choice of poem for this page, I have taken the liberty of choosing one of my favorites. It will be followed by an excerpt from Bryan's GENERATIONS. Considered as parts of a larger whole, they show two very different regional sensibilities coming together, for better or worse, to wed and to write ...


THE VISIT

by Isabel Nathaniel


In the kitchen I tell your mother and grandmother,
don't worry. They are polite
but concerned. I want to be shown
how to make white gravy and biscuits.
They think you're a fool, marrying
again. They are sorry I'm from New York.
This sky is different, like a foreign country,
like Russia. I could know it from Chekhov.
There could be two rows of tall, closely planted
trees, like walls, forming an avenue. Tomorrow
I'll meet your brothers and sisters.
Your sons will arrive, and smile at me.
In the evening the band will play in the plaza.
Here the trees would be live oak, green all year.

Copyright 1996 by Isabel Nathaniel.

from GENERATIONS and other true stories:

by Bryan Woolley


"The word that comes into my mind as I remember
those interminable hours of squirming on the hard
wooden benches is "hot" -- the perspiring faces of the
women and the faint whit, whit of their cardboard funeral-
home fans trying to stir a breeze into the sticky air; the
torrid white sunlight just beyond the edge of the Tabernacle
roof; the sweating evangelist, coatless, his neck-tie
loosened, leaning over the pulpit, and his detailed
description of the eternal fires of hell and the everlasting
agonies of those doomed to dwell therein; the fervent
tears of the repentant as they plodded down the aisle,
hunched under the weight of their sins."


Copyright 1995 by Bryan Woolley.

E-mail Isabel at IsabelN@aol.com