Description
Fire is the fulcrum on which the losses in Candescent are bound and purified. Linda Parsons’s fifth collection gathers the tinder of fallen idols and smudges her changed life with burning sage—the loss of a marriage, the long decline of a father into dementia, the passing of a beloved dog. Candescence smolders within, flown like ashes of the past. In this journey from grief to humility and discovery, she at last finds her dragon voice, bows to the impermanence that infuses our earthly time. We can carry grief on our backs or in our bodies, or we can allow it to illuminate and deepen our path forward. What lifts this collection into new territory is Parsons’s conscious path to healing and acceptance through Buddhist meditation. Using the images of meditation is a way for her writing to act as a healing practice not only for herself, but for all who hear and read the poems, a laying on of hands and words, light begetting light.
Praise for Candescent
The light of home, of memory. Of kin, those who are passing through the vale—“like my father on the hillock of his final pass”—and those who hold “the future white hot in your hands.” The blue-black light of endings. The morning light rekindled. Linda Parsons’ Candescent is a shimmering gift to us, her readers, our lives illuminated by her words, precise and true: “embers in the gloaming spit like tickseed / from grasses.”
—Pauletta Hansel, Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome
Linda Parsons honors grief. She shares with us her knowing that as the threads of our lives unravel, so too, gifts materialize in ways we never dreamed. Here, trauma is transformed into a journey of enlightenment. We come to understand that what first appears as a door marked “Loss,” the author walks through victorious, fully revitalized, with a flare of capriciousness. She finds a new depth of being, and joy in every breath taken.
—Stellasue Lee, Ph.D., Editor Emerita at RATTLE, author of Crossing the Double Yellow Line and Firecracker RED
In Linda Parsons’ new collection, Candescent, idols fall, marriages fail, and bodies falter, yet the mind still seeks, the heart still sings, and the spirit still centers. Her poems explore what it means and why it matters that love “[c]overs the ground we live and perish on.” Sometimes we seem surrounded by only grief and lamentation, forsaken by the years, but Parsons reminds us that we are never not on a Damascus road—“wayward,” yes, but always in the presence of “wayfinders” leading us toward transformation. While we may be only passing through, up ahead and drawing near is Bethlehem, blessing, delight, peace, joy, “the aching / bliss of it all.”
—Jeff Hardin, No Other Kind of World
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