Poetry. OF RAIN AND NETTLES WOVE is Gillian Parrish's first full-length book of poetry; it is; however, as Gillian Conoley notes, a mature work, so wise in its playfulness and sudden depths. Haunted by the American West and Midwest (one thinks of Niedecker, Oppen, Eigner) and the Far East (Basho, the I-Ching)--though with a sure-footed, sprightly music all their own--come these painterly, filmic, gorgeously sounded lyrics of sturdy ground and flight. As Michael Heller contends, the boldness of the book, its spiritual hunger, its stops and starts, its erasures and ongoings has the immediacy of the first transformative brush stroke on a canvas.