Customer Reviews

Shadow of Heaven: Poems

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Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Shadow of Heaven" is a moveable feast of words and images that have great "carrying" power. I love poems that you read and then carry those words and images with you through the day - and weeks and years - after you read them. A fine example is *The Others* on Page 23. This poem alone is worth the price of admission and I promise you will never look at Michelangelo's Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel ceiling the same way again.

As I read Ellen Bryant Voight's book of poems, Shadow of Heaven, I thought to myself that she was a very good descriptive writer and painter of mood. I mean, I felt "something" but when you look at her poems, a lot of the times they make no sense. The poems are uneven, with there being some great ones, but interspersed with ones that are average. I liked one called "Practice":

"To weep unbidden, to wake
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker of the face of the clock

to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward-"

There's a lot of poems in here that condemn the acceptance of situations. Whether it's a stale marriage that people just stay in because they feel safe in it or condemn some source of spirtual sterility. One almost feels if you are reading a "mini-Blake", there is so much righteous anger boiling under the brim of this nature poet.

There is a great satiric poem in here called "Plaza del Sol" which pokes fun with some amount of disgust at all the ugly out of shape human beings as they bask their bloated bodies on a beach in Florida.

While there are some poems touching on foreign lands and some half-baked fairy tales, Voight stays much the personal poet who has more talent in describing the workings of nature rather than the relationships between human beings. If Voight could somehow become more clear on what she was trying to say, she would be a great poet.