Shadows on Wood by Lacy Snapp

“It is time the stone took the trouble to bloom” Paul Celan once wrote, and in Lacy Snapp’s visionary poems just about everything does. This is a world of trees, brick, flowers, seed pods, but also ghosts from her past and her family history, and the two define and redefine each other in a way that instill in her—and us—a “cosmic affirmation.”  Snapp must be considered one of our important new ecological poets who have redefined the scope of ecology as a more encompassing and complex vision of the world, one seen as an “Intricate being made of fire and flight.” In lush, flowing lines, she carries us on that flight. I can’t think of a more timely poetry for our depleted environment, or for our souls.

–Richard Jackson, author of Where The Wind Comes From and Broken Horizons

Beyond the elements that bind us to our earthly lives is the ethereal element of time. Whether a reminder of its passing in 15-minute increments from a wormy chestnut clock or in the heartpine measured and dovetailed in the basement for her great-grandmother’s coffin, Lacy Snapp’s narrative of carpentry shines in her debut chapbook, Shadows on Wood. Each board, each family legend, whorls its own universe: “a cosmic affirmation that I will also continue / to change, evolve as I pull, pull from what’s around me… wondering / what future story a two-inch slice of my soul will tell.” Snapp gazes into time’s grain and rings to see herself more clearly—and invites us to do the same.

–Linda Parsons, author of Candescent and This Shaky Earth

The images in Lacy Snapp’s indelible Shadows on Wood immerse readers into the grains and textures of various woods and the memories and associations they invoke. Such poems as “Heartpine” and “Wormy Chestnut” guide us through the deep lineage of labor as we get to know a young woman who learns woodworking as a centerpiece of her family’s legacy. In other poems, like “Becoming a Ghost,” we are drawn into the contemporary life of a speaker who moves through the world with her own unseen companions. Lacy Snapp knows shadows and wood the way painters know the delicacy or coarseness of their brush tips. She conveys her perceptions through exquisite detail and piercing emotion– beauty and heartbreak walk hand-in-hand here and their impact will linger long after this book has been read, set aside, and then read again.

–Jesse Graves, Author of Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine and Merciful Days