STEP LIGHTLY by Donna Wolf-Palacio

 

STEP LIGHTLY  by Donna Wolf-Palacio is a book filled  with questions that are nearly impossible  to answer, but this poet never stops asking, “So who is  who and what is what?”  She also never stops pounding “the stone floor” for answers. These are gorgeous poems.  They are also complicated poems because life is very complicated. Political concerns are addressed subtly, almost  slyly, interwoven into lyric poems, but with warning and, at times, dark humor.  Throughout the book, Wolf-Palacio uses stunning and moving imagery and language.  “If the world shatters will you pick me up and hold me to your ear?”  In the end, what matters is the matter of being alive, the matter of time, space, relying on what  we see and cannot see, and alterations of self and body.  “Though it is hard to accept the collapse of the body,” Wolf-Palacio returns, again and again, to a deep tenderness: “Pretend I’m lifting you to pick an apple off a tree you can’t see. /You take my word for it, and the apple appears.”  I could not put this book down.

–Amy Small-McKinney, Winner of the 2016 Kithara Book Prize

 

The paintings of the virgins are like unopened pecans. Donna Wolf-Palacio’s language is deceptively simple. Before we know it we find ourselves in the presence of the largest cosmic questions, unfolding in ordinary life, plain as pecans. Who is who and what is what asks  one poem, and like the Chinese poets she occasionally  pays homage to, she brings the world to us in a nutshell, intimate, unpretentious, wondrous. Better to believe in something you can spare is  her tender warning to us, and these poems don’t shy  away from the dark, nor the humor we can’t spare. To take these poems in your hand  is like holding a tree branch that’s in bud – you can’t look away from the astonishment.

 

Some days, it seems

The sky pushes through

 

to tell  me one true thing.

But I have no intention

of being pulled in

 

by belief or wonder.

Sometimes I regret this.

Go ahead, make a sandwich…

 

[from Late July 2014]

–Catherine Bancroft

 

The Chinese poets of centuries past would have admired Donna Wolf-Palacio’s poems. I, too, have been under the spell of the wisdom and compassion of her poetry for many years. The poems of  Step Lightly  search for clues and artifacts and find, in an edgy world, a smoothing and comforting like the raking of a Zen garden. I recommend reading Beirut and Vermont back-to-back. Here we are given entrances to her world, that becomes ours. Where else can we rest? she asks. Here, Donna Wolf-Palacio, we can rest here I trust, safely, with an understanding of the beauty of the world and what the purpose of Beauty is. This is brilliant poetry.

–Leonard Gontarek, author