Customer Reviews

What the Light Was Like: Poems

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Dazzle and singular wit meet memory in Luci Shaw's latest volume of poems, What the Light Was Like. Of her seven collections, this is my favorite: passion hums beneath restraint, scenes linger, meaning unfurls.

The poems are divided into four sections -- Outside, Inside, Downside, Upside -- and each season and landscape somehow becomes our landscape, our time. Enchanted, we enter in: "My whole body an ear, an eye."

There's humor too, in an outhouse tale, in the irresistible steps to mimicking crickets: "... collect a spoon's worth of saliva / on your flattened tongue, and ..." I dutifully followed all the directions. They work.

There is also sobering insight here: "Remember, / love is made for something dire." Throughout the book as well as her life, Shaw examines and celebrates nature even as nature, in turn, ponders her. Perhaps her line about Botticelli's Madonna best captures the voice behind these luminous poems: "... singing as if she had swallowed a linnet--".

There is a tree turning gold once again outside my window, here in Wisconsin. I have been watching it for years, including the year of my mother's final illness and the early years of grief. Today the sun is flowing through the golden leaves, and I am not thinking about loss. My spirits are uplifted as I ponder the Light. I think time spent this week rereading WHAT THE LIGHT WAS LIKE, by Luci Shaw, is why this familiar scene is transformed.

This book is dedicated to Margaret Smith, "herself a gifted poet and kindred spirit" (p.13). The two poets exchanged cards from a variety of places. In the Foreward--worthy of rereading too--Shaw says, "'What the light was like' became our antiphonal theme. Back and forth the cards came and went for years. Some of our word pictures ended up in poems. Images are like that; they tend to attach themselves to nouns and verbs and adjectives" (p. 13).

Shaw, who was born in 1928, says in the first poem that she wants her "...words/to hold, growing maybe an inch a year,/grateful for the least glisten of dew" (p. 17). The title of this poem is "Tenting, Burr Trail, Long Canyon, Escalante." There is beauty, honesty, courage, and theology in the variety of poems which follow.

WHAT THE LIGHT WAS LIKE was published by WordFarm (copyright 2006 by Luci Shaw). I appreciate how each poem has plenty of space around it. For example, "Getting on Board" fills Page 24 and concludes with two lines on Page 25. The next poem begins on Page 26. This allows the reader space to reflect, or even to put the book down and look out the window at the light shining in her own yard.

Luci Shaw is a word person. This is human emotion, theology, reality, all wrapped in one package, written by a masterful writer.