Shadow Light by Denise Low

Poet and poetry instructor Denise Low has pared words down to their essence in Shadow Light, an award-winning collection from Red Mountain Press, which she kindly sent me to review.

These highly compressed poems begin with “Eyes,” whose lines baffled me at first reading and demanded a closer look. Having experienced blue circles around lights before cataract surgery, my eyes soon focused on:

“A fourth circle of Paradise - ultra-violets
- opens to hummingbirds - cataract patients.”

[Note: On the actual pages, no dashes occur in the typesetting but spaces, which my blog program removes with confusion ensuing, thus my insertion of the occasional dash.]

Even poems which seem clear at first reading require another look to see the deeper subject at play. For instance, in the playful but thought-provoking poem “Ceilings:”

“I look up just as the Louvre’s ceiling Icarus
falls from his father’s arms forward
painted wings behind him.
He plummets into
my gravity-squared
marble floor tile.”

The same poem also gives us a glimpse of the poet's skill in handling metaphor and descriptive detail, for example:

“Chandeliers dangling are cocktail glasses brimming effervescence.”

In the title poem, “Shadow Light,” we see how a “Birch forest shapes ragged darkness.” Then:

“Past shadows, where light glimmers
its celestial yellow, chiaroscuro,
my dead sister appears, back lit….”

When the following words appear, however, we can’t be sure if the living poet or deceased relative says:

“Don’t you know you are in Heaven?”

Perhaps, both give voice to those words.

An intriguing voice of Native America especially appeals to me. For example, in “Naming Willis Bird,” poetic lines call on each aspect of the Winds:

“Winds of the South: Here is Bird. Treat him well.
Winds of the South: You are good for my aching bones.”

And,

“West Winds: This is the direction of sunset and darkness.
You balance the sunrise. I know you as the place of dreams.”

In “Chicory Afternoon,” the poet speaks of a porcupine as “a nimble fat man’s shadow,” and in “Where the Dead Go:”

“Snow petals ghost
the northern wind.”

The last poem, “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County,” invites or returns us to ancestral abodes where:

“The lead man lifts his black hat and calls from the center.

I wait for the tail-end of the man-woman procession. Lead women
are shell shakers. Double-time steps rustle turtle-shell rattled tied to
shins.

Men sing and sing loud. Women step-step hard. The inner circle
might turn sideways to the fire.

My grandfather and grandmother lived on Lenape land near this
spot. Their footprints remain in the ground.”

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2018, poet-writer, reviewer

Shadow Light, paperback

Poetry Review: Mélange Block by Denise Low

Published by Red Mountain Press, the new poetry book Mélange Block introduced me to the work of poet Denise Low, whose 20 books of award-winning poems and essays have already seen print. The review copy I received also let me know she’s been honored as Poet Laureate for the state of Kansas where she began the creative writing program at Haskell Indian Nations University – impressive!

But what about the poems? Would they stand up to the expectations set by the back jacket blurbs? The first poem “Minerals” immediately answered that question in sparse words thick with mystery and images.

Women count winter bones
trapped in forests of fossil ferns,
choose some to breath again.

That poem sets the tone and pace with occasional variations and a hint of story. In “Magma: Springerville Volcanic Field,” for example, we see:

Brother’s walkingstick grinds grit ash
old film Journey to the Center of the Earth
rerun dream halfway along a twilight trek
as cones cross miles a dead museum of lava.
Prophecy of fire says he is halfway home.

The compression of story into cryptic lines gives the light brushstrokes found in haiku but with a sense of movement – even in the making of “Sedimentation: Alligator Junipers” where we find “agate-ring years/ seared drought forged/ creased wrinkled torsos.” So compressed, and yet you can sense the passage of time as story.

That movement of time, however, might be in a flash as shown in “Parallax” where we see:

Eye of the backyard fox
trapped on night film
occipital orb flashes white
void encircled by night.

Or time might freeze in the sound of a “Volcanic Core” where the “Throat of a volcano stands/ frozen in a final bass note.”

Revealing a highly observant eye and sensitive ear, this mélange (mixture of styles, shapes, colors, or rock matrix) deals honestly with a landscape of subjects – from growing old to a family freezing one bitter winter to Dega “rasping/ charcoal against grained paper.” Their clarity and compression encompass us all.

© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler


Mélange Block, paperback



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