Beneath Occluded Shine by Claudia M. Stanek

Fifty years after Pablo Neruda completed his Book of Questions, Claudia Stanek bravely reaches back through time—long before Neruda, into the deepest parts of our shared humanity—in search of answers. Threaded with the spiritual, the historical, and the natural, Stanek weaves together these 16 short but powerful poems in Beneath Occluded Shine that embrace the surreal, push up against the paradoxical, and remind readers that sometimes a question can only be answered with another question.

–Denton Loving, author of Tamp

Claudia Stanek‘s Beneath Occluded Shine is filled with questions of life and death–what’s here, what’s gone. Nature with its clouds, land and sea mingle with the invisible as well as language. At the same time, a ribbon of the divine, like a reverent of seasons, winds itself through her lines, as she deals with what must be kept for the living. Her use of rhyme blends into the sounds of what comes before and what comes afterwards in this topography of disappearances and returns.
Fireplaces, foundries, forest, foliage, full…”a standard of tender remains.”

–Gail Hosking, author of the memoir Snake’s Daughter and poetry books, The Tug and Retrieval.