Gold Star for "Blue Patina" Former Faculty Member Lauded
The book cover was designed by USU Eastern adjunct professor Janet Bergera of Helper. Her late husband Cliff Bergera was an art faculty member at USU Eastern.
Nancy Takacs, Utah State University Eastern English department member from 1986 to 2008, is receiving high praise for her newest book of poems, Blue Patina.
The book includes poetry that traverse Utah, Lake Superior and New Jersey landscapes. Former poet laureate for the state of Utah, David Lee, notes that “Besides being one of the best kept secrets in Rocky Mountain literature, Nancy Takacs is genuinely one of the most generous and very most talented poets I have ever read.”
Takacs says that she is “drawn to nature,” when asked to discuss her latest project.
“It has always been inside me, even as a girl growing up in a city in New Jersey, where I found myself in parks or outside on the sidewalk under the trees, playing with friends,” she says. “I think Blue Patina’s poems reflect my love of nature and what I have learned from it, as well as how Utah is an important place for me — its roominess and beauty and the small-town culture of Carbon County and its surrounding quiet canyons.”
She is also a very social person and so people in her book are too. In the process of writing her poems, she acquired a deeper understanding of her acquaintances in the Price grocery store, her Wellington neighbors, her relatives, husband and childhood friends, she says.
Takacs was featured on YouTube as Utah Arts and Museums’ Bite-Size Poet for January 2016 in the reading of The Worrier.
She was at USU in Logan in February and at Snow College’s convocation in March giving readings as part of the Helicon West Reading Series. She will also be at Fairmont State University in West Virginia in April.
~ Beth Icard