Light in Light

Light in Light paints a river of illumined images highlighting the author's compilation of experiences, emotions, and memories as not only being grist for the poems, but illustrating a living and breathing record of the poet's personal journey. Whether it is pondering the delights of childhood with its remembrances and long imagination, or later in life, being immersed in suffering, there is witnessing and validation. These conversational poems, chock-full with confessions of faith, are immersed in magic and music, rich imagery, and well-crafted design. The poet plunges into living out the ordinary through the extraordinary, by breathing in the secrets of the peony, the magnolia, the music of the dream. The poet waits for dawn, and for hope that liberates the soul through the natural world, with its transforming spiritual impact. This collection of poems is about health to the bones, the heart, the spirit, and it is through suffering and longing that the tattered soul is unlatched and liberated. As the poet scrutinizes the world, she sees with a creative eye. She scans her past and present with a wide lens, as a noticer of details and particulars, through the poetic expression of enlightening images and metaphors.

""'A certain kind of dazzle' inhabits Gerrish's endlessly lovely lines--'snug like stepping into wool slippers on Sunday morning'--yet also ravishingly lit by spirit, by storm, by magic. 'October air turning crisp like white transparent apples' or a father's voice 'like soft thunder'--line by line, phrase by phrase, metaphor by metaphor, from girlhood memories to elegy to ancestors' memories of genocide, Light in Light is one of the strongest, most delicate, visionary, and humane collections of American poetry I know.""
--Alicia Ostriker, author of The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

""As suggested by one poem's title--'Odes and Elegies'--Deborah Gerrish captures the love of the sacred world, while mourning her losses. Here her backwards glance at her family's history of escape and the death of her loved ones is balanced by her love of beauty and the mysteries of the natural world in which the everyday is extraordinary.""
--Anne Marie Macari, author of Red Deer

""These tender and important poems explore a personal history the way a brilliant mineral vein runs through stone. Light in Light sustains a narrative that simultaneously divides and unifies voices of mothers, daughters, and parents in an American nostalgia set against the backdrop of a generation that escaped the Turkish killing fields of 1915. These poems walk the boundaries of old and new, of nature and prayer, and intuitively divine the light hidden in everything.""
--Sean Nevin, author of Oblivio Gate

Deborah Gerrish is an award winning poet and author of The Language of Rain (2008) and The Language of Paisley (2012). She was awarded an Edward Fry Fellowship for scholarship research work at Rutgers University where she received her EdD in Literacy Education, and holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. She teaches poetry workshops at Fairleigh Dickinson University and resides in New Jersey with her husband, Jim, and cat, Shakespeare.