A nice tie-in

The New York Review of Books has posted, from its archive, a 1999 essay by Joan Acocella on Vaslav Nijinsky. (I'd like to think that the NYRB's timing is a response to Meg sparling's recent collection, The Nijinsky Poems, but it probably has more to do with Acocella's new collection of essays, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, which is reviewed by Joyce Carol Oates in the NYRB's current issue.)

On a recent rainy Wednesday

Meg Sparling, author of The Nijinsky Poems, writes about an exhibition of Nijinsky's drawings in New York.

2006 titles

Fiction

Line Jester and Other Stories
by Michael Duncan

Michael Duncan's debut chapbook takes the reader through surreal landscapes, where art is both necessary and impossible. Throughout his writing, the force of Duncan's ideas is matched with an exacting attention to language and detail. Line Jester and Other Stories offers a bracing reminder of the power of beauty, and a singular, expressionist aesthetic. (more)

Poetry

The Nijinsky Poems
by Meg Sparling

In The Nijinsky Poems, Meg Sparling has crafted a sensitive and insightful revisiting of the life of one of the 20th Century's greatest artists. Combining the biographical with the lyrical, Sparling's writing embodies the power and contingency of the dancer. The Nijinsky Poems is a haunting tribute to a delicate and beautiful man, and a nimble, unerring performance of its own. (more)

Drama

Between the Water and the Air
by Andrew Hungerford

By turns wistful and compelling, Between the Water and the Air is the story of a father and a son, a brother and a sister, a girl, and a mechanic. Ken, a former scholarship student with a habit of running away from responsibility, is forced by his father's declining health and increasingly insistent family to confront his sense of displacement within his own life. (more)

The Nijinsky Poems

The Nijinsky Poems by Meg Sparling

In The Nijinsky Poems, Meg Sparling has crafted a sensitive and insightful revisiting of the life of one of the 20th Century's greatest artists. Combining the biographical with the lyrical, Sparling's writing embodies the power and contingency of the dancer. The Nijinsky Poems is a haunting tribute to a delicate and beautiful man, and a nimble, unerring performance of its own.

The artist in light

Nijinsky stands in a room of glass—
the laughter of light around him.
Color is absent here,
but makes its absence known.
(In this room his mind is crazed with color.)
Three chairs line the far wall—
the middle facing opposite the others.
His daughter sits in this chair,
swatting playfully at nothing.
"Papa, a bee, Papa," she shrieks.
Her sound is a fragile surface here.
Silent Nijinsky stands in the light,
clothed in gravity’s love.

Poetry, 19 pp. Click here to download PDF in new window.

Meg Sparling grew up in a small town in northern Michigan. She attended Michigan State University, where she was general editor of Red Cedar Review. She has been writing stories since the first grade; in third grade she plagarized a story about dragons from her teacher, but she promises that everything written since has been completely original. She lives in New York City.

Also by Meg Sparling: "On a recent rainy Wednesday"