What the Light Was Like: Poems

By Luci Shaw

"This is what a sacramental poetry sounds like," says fellow poet Paul Mariani of Luci Shaw's new collection, What the Light Was Like. Shaw holds up both world and words to the light, revealing to us what has been there all along and teaching us how to see it for ourselves-with honesty, precision and patience.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974342793
• ISBN13: 9780974342795
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: WordFarm
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

You will have to think. This isn't high school poetry.

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

Dazzle and singular wit

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--".