UPON THEM THE LIGHT SHINED by Matt Bialer

 

Grief is the shadow love casts in the light of loss,” wrote Emily Dickinson. Words that echo down the years, resoundingly; each generation who loses a love finding them ever more accurate. If Dickinson was the bard of grieving in the 1800s, Matthew Bialer might be our resident expert today. In this new book he expands his poetic repertoire of love-grief, marrying it to several other themes. Upon Them Hath Love Shined explores the loss of a love light and also a love light found, against the backdrop of repeated mysterious light visitations in the night sky off the east coast, never properly identified in recent years. If love’s arrival and departure are mysterious,all the more so in a world filled with unexplained lights. In this, his 27th book, Bialer marries two of his chief poetic interests, UAPs and love. Bring in a  poetic examination of Handel’s Messiah and you have a quartet of themes that braid and illuminate one another. At times, the lines in this 69-page book length poem could be about any or all of these subjects. “From shadow/ To light/Shadow/To light/From aching lament/To explosions of joy/Ascension/Composed/In just 24 days/Without getting much sleep,”could evoke stages of loss or early love, listening to the Messiah, or losing sleep staring at the night sky, and finding there colossal mystery.
It is wonderful to see Matt mend his broken heart with a poetry of new love, and wrap this with the mysteries of musical genius and strange night time light intruders. Like love itself,these are things it seems we will never truly understand.

–E. Cohen, poet and author of Mermaids of Albuquerque, Bird Light, and The Patron Saint of Cauliflower,among other works.

 

Bialer’s UPON THEM THE LIGHT SHINED trains the reader’s attention throughout to specific points, emphasizing and building like an orchestral crescendo. It moves, quickly and vibrantly, with each stanza, to that moment when all we have is the echo pulling us in.

–Aria Ligi, Award-winning poet and author of The Romantic Series, arialigi.com

 

Matt Bialer‘s latest poem is an immersive mindscape—a realm of thought and feeling large enough to encompass Handel’s “Messiah,” drone sightings and conspiracy theories, a holiday lightscape at the Botanical Gardens, and an array of Biblical quotations. Bialer’s signature repetition of key phrases reveals the poet circling again and again through his central concerns—the history of religious yearning, the absurdity (and power) of social media, and, far deeper than all, the nature of romantic and familial love. There is mystery and comfort to be found in Bialer’s night sky, its “faraway orbs and blinking lights,” in his portrait of Handel as “musical megastar,” and in his portrayal of living with grief even as new love shines. Here, feeling shifts “from shadow to light.” Bialer’s words are magical, his images unforgettable. Immerse yourself in this singular “spectacle of light.”

–Elisabeth Frost, author of All of Us: Poems, among other books, and editor of the Poetic Justice Institute poetry series from Fordham Press.

 

Universal and yet painfully current, this book could be added to a time capsule for readers of future generations to understand the mess of now. The hidden gift of a poem, music, or indeed any work of art, is to open a door while making us feel that it was created for us alone. Sometimes, even one right word is enough: “A man of sorrow/And acquainted with grief/Grief/Grief/Like the word/Was created for me.” Bialer’s work makes us feel seen in our own moments of “aching lament and explosive joy.” But, like the lights in the sky that loop and flicker through this book, can the rejoicing be trusted? Bialer seems to think so. The poem’s narrator, reflecting with quiet awe on his new relationship, concludes “Our love is the light.”

–Hollis Kurman, author of Unlikely Skylight