The Tide of Bermuda's Light

By Wendy Fulton Steginsky

Ash-white urchins, blood-orange hibiscus, paw paw juice, pashminas, pittisporum, neap tides, and longtails. Feast, ...drench yourself, ...eavesdrop, Wendy Fulton Steginsky invites us as she immerses us in her native Bermuda and her poems' richly textured life. We colonial girls knew all shades/of tropical hot, spoke the language/of kiskadees with a good fifty descriptors/for ocean's moods. The Tide of Bermuda's Light does not turn away from the island's beauty nor its history; it faces the painful facts of colonialism as bravely as its ancestors faced the "green sword of water" they had to cross. What better way to explore an island than in a book of poems, all of them small islands in themselves, all of them with shorelines where "mind's thirst and sea's freedom meet." This is a liberating book, teaching us to love wherever our roots are, their tethers, their launching pads. This is not just a celebration of a particular place, but also an exploration of the power of place and how immersion in it gives us a language that opens our eyes and deepens our souls. Indeed it is no coincidence that the last word of this book is soul. -Dr. Christopher Bursk, author of The Improbable Swervings of Atoms This collection offers an evocative portrait of Wendy Fulton Steginsky's island home-memories rich with the texture of limestone and laden with the scent of cedar. For anyone who has experienced the nostalgia of exile, these poems are a reminder of how the landscape of our original home is the one that haunts us, serving as the measuring stick for all future experiences. We are given a sense in this collection of how Steginsky's Bermuda has found its way beyond the reef line of its remote Atlantic shoals and appears now, through the conduit of her imaginings, winding through the dusk of another world and blending with the experiences of another time. Steginsky's Tide pulls us in, clamouring like springtime longtails for a glimpse of Bermuda's enchanting shores. -Dr. Kim Dismont Robinson, Department of Community and Cultural Affairs, Bermuda What is fascinating in Wendy Steginsky's poetry is to see her reaching again and again to feel the heartbeat of the place by caressing its landscape with words. Almost every poem is an attempt to reach the deepest recesses of the inner Bermuda by lovingly touching the physical island with language. And, as she knows so well, the deepest recesses contain a complex history and a fragile present, which hover obliquely over the landscape that she praises so sensitively. As she says, in beautiful understatement: "This island's inside/me when I awake." -Kendel Hippolyte, author of Fault Lines

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0692238808
• ISBN13: 9780692238806
• Release Date: August 2014
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 42 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"