Heart of the Light by Lisa Zerkle

Review of Heart of the Light available from Wild Goose Poetry Review

http://wildgoosepoetryreview.wordpress.com/

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

What I like best about Lisa Zerkle’s poems is their honesty. She has heart, she has humor, but she never sentimentalizes, never makes the world into something she would like it to be. Her world, beautifully etched out in sharp and compelling narratives, simply is what it is. We are at the bottom of a well looking for the heart of the light, which is very hard to see. Even the best of us can carry the urge to kill. Ruined as we are, we keep going. We get by the demon, the destruction, and keep looking, always aware of just what the world is, always aware that though we can never make pure beauty, we can, like the spider, “begin again.”

–Anthony Abbott, author of If Words Could Save Us

Lisa Zerkle’s poems sear and burn through worlds within worlds. This collection is electric with the “strain and snap” of life. An acute observer, Zerkle weaves spells to capture the reader with lines as luminous as the spider’s web she so beautifully describes. A naturalist’s eye nails what many of us miss, from the intimacy of chipmunks to relentless destruction, be it war or the way “demon” drink lurks in the shadows. A wry and honest intelligence explores loss and beauty with both delicate and powerful descriptions. Like her subtle, yet all-seeing cats or the wizards in her mother & son poem, Zerkle’s magical way with words lifted this reader up from the well where “someone is always drowning” to the Heart of the Light.

–Diana Pinckney, author of Green Daughters