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The Light in Our Houses (Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry)

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Sometimes I think that I'm the only person in the world who knows about the poetry of Al Maginnes, that I have stumbled onto something glorious that no one else -- save Al himself -- has yet discovered. I've been reading Al's poems in literary journals for years, and when TAKING UP OUR DAILY TOOLS, Al's first collection, was published, I read that, too. It is a fine book, one I still pick up now and again when I need a little lesson on life.

THE LIGHT IN OUR HOUSES takes up where TAKING UP OUR DAILY TOOLS leaves off. The poetry in this new collection is stronger and more well defined than the poems in TAKING UP OUR DAILY TOOLS. The poems in THE LIGHT IN OUR HOUSES serve as parables for how we live our lives. Al Maginnes does not take the world lightly in these poems. His work is fraught with danger and sadness, with lost love and death, with a yearning to reconcile one's past with the present in a world which is chaotic and rarely forgiving.

However, these poems are not without hope. In his work, Mr. Maginnes seems always to be searching for a happy ending, for something relevant and useful in all of us, no matter the amount of sorrow or pain through which we might wade. In "Happy Endings," the final poem of THE LIGHT IN OUR HOUSES, Maginnes notes that "if we can tell a story in which any lovers / find some grace, we should believe any happiness / we can contrive" and that "all stories end, / most of them unhappily, but we can never cease / telling them, can never surrender the hope / lying at the bottom of the page." It is hope, friends, that underlies the poems in this fine collection, and this hopefulness is why I like to consider Al Maginnes' poems my secret, a secret well worth letting out of the bag.