Into the Splashing by Deborah Darling

In, among and behind the tragic specifics of loss in these poems lies the unyielding beauty of the elemental, lake, a hard blue sky, a moon shell, rain, things that comfort and appall by changing nothing. This moving collection explores the struggle for acceptance even as it articulates heartbreakingly the plea for the lost to come back to us.

–Nancy Eimers, author of Oz and Human Figures

Deborah Darling’s Into the Splashing reckons with grief in poems that are plaintive and unflinching. Her beautifully crystalline lines unravel the reader emotionally while showing us the solace of the act of remembrance.

–Alen Hamza, author of Twice There Was a Country

Into the Splashing, a powerfully moving meditation on and lament for the poet’s deceased son, teems with honesty, passion, authenticity, reverence, and humility which is to say it’s full of, quite simply, love: a mother’s love for her son and for her family. But it’s also love for any of us and all of us who will, eventually, have to accept the bitter truth that “Good things have been lost / forever.” Darling’s poems reveal this difficult certainty deeply and profoundly and for the gift of this book’s humanity, truth and love, for the strong and generous hand it offers, all of us should be so grateful.

–Scott Bade, author of My Favorite Thing About Desire

The courage to occupy a defining grief may be the most noble form that courage may assume for an artist no less than for a parent who has lost a grown child. Deborah Darling’s “Smiling One” is a jewel of a lyric, a mother’s wholly unsentimental expression of unfettered love for an infant, and it resonates throughout this collection with other such anecdotes of mother love in the midst of joy as well as sorrow. This book is a gracefully measured, elegantly pitched requiem that affirms all life sanctified by grief.

–Richard Katrovas, founding director of the Prague summer program for writers and author of Poets and Those Who Love Them; a Memoir in Essays