The Wild Severance contains six poems that serve as a prologue and an epilogue and introduce each of the book’s four sections. They form a loose narrative depicting a deadly encounter between a hawk and a crow and stand as an extended metaphor exploring the difficulties of living a complex human life—loss, loneliness, desperation, joy, sorrow, love. As the poem “O” observes, ‘The hawk bows to the breast of the crow / with the abandon of a lover. Beak for teeth / tearing away at the heart’s cover.’ The book opens with a poem entitled “Orison,” which calls into consciousness its central symbol of brutality, the hawk, and is followed by “Crow,” which introduces the book’s first section and initiates an exploration of the dark dualities of predator and prey, perpetrator and victim, guilt and innocence, fear and fearlessness, terror and assurance. The Wild Severance concludes with “Hawk and Crow,” which begins ‘When morning returns’ and ends with ‘prayer.’ This book takes its reader, therefore, on an undulating flight through darkness to light.

The type and layout of The Wild Severance were designed and composed by Bertha Rogers, using Adobe InDesign. The book and cover are set in Adobe InDesign Lapidary333 Book Type.The book was printed on 60-lb. offset, acid-free, recycled paper in the United States of America. This first edition is limited to copies in paper wrappers.

V. P. Loggins is the author of The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Main Street Rag 2010) and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series 2007). He has published one book of criticism on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and is co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review, First Things, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review and Tampa Review, among others. He has been a finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the May Swenson Award, and the Tampa Review Prize. Talking Drums, an art exhibition and installation by sculptor and ceramicist Andrew Cooke, music by Paddy Craig, based on poems in The Fourth Paradise, appeared in Portaferry, Northern Ireland. His work has been featured in A Universe of Dreams, poetry and music performed nationally by Neal Conal of National Public Radio and Ensemble Galilei. Born in
Birmingham, Alabama and raised in Illinois, V. P. Loggins holds a Ph.D in English Renaissance literature from Purdue University and has taught most recently at the United States Naval Academy.