What the Light Was Like

Luci Shaw

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Retail Price: $18.00
Subject Category: Poetry
Length: 79 pages
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Binding: paper
Published: August 2006
ISBN: 978-0-9743427-9-5

 

"When William Stafford died, I wondered who there was to carry on in his spirit—humane, attentive, droll, faithful, one for whom writing poetry was as natural as breathing. And, reading What the Light Was Like, I see it has been Luci Shaw all along."

Mark Jarman, author of To the Green Man and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry

"This is what a sacramental poetry sounds like. In What the Light Was Like, Luci Shaw holds up the world and words to the light, and the light in turn gathers into a marvelous translucency to reveal what is there if only we will take the time and effort to rinse our eyes and look. This is her strongest book of poems yet, page after page gifting us with one authentic and felicitous revelation after another. Read her. She just might change the way you see what's there before you."

Paul Mariani, author of Thirty Days and Deaths & Transfigurations: Poems

"I have been reading Luci Shaw's books of poems for thirty-five years or so, each book a reliable companion in exegeting the word and presence of God even as I live it. Here's the latest: I turn a page and see a piece of creation that I had seen but not seen, recognize a soul's syllable that I had heard but not heard--resurrection poems."

Eugene H. Peterson, translator of The Message

"Luci Shaw's poems are as fresh as today's news and as timeless as the mountains and waters of her Pacific Northwest. This collection promises and delivers light, and much more: heart, shadow, nuance, the grace of a world keenly observed and shared."

Michael Wilt, editor, www.NimbleSpirit.com

"In Luci Shaw's poems, which manage the almost impossible feat of being sacerdotal without being sanctimonious, God reveals himself through nature: 'In the clasp of two/ saber-shaped leaves heaven looked like/ the gaze of God peering through the eye of a needle'--and often through the landscape of the poet's beloved Pacific Northwest. But the love is not held in a safe loop between the God of nature and the poet; it is directed in turn toward others. 'Remember,' the poet tells us, 'love is made for something dire."

Andrew Hudgins, author of Ecstatic in the Poison and Babylon in a Jar

"Lovely, original, deeply felt work from one of America's most thoughtful spiritual poets. Luci Shaw once again startles us awake with her great talent and profound insights."

Philip Zaleski, editor, The Best American Spiritual Writing series