Candescent
Candescent by Linda Parsons is a collection of poems that succeeds in what its title denotes: to glow from within. Is it not a great achievement in this life to shine from our core, amidst the travails and tragedies that life brings? In these poems, the speaker documents her wrestling matches with grief, from watching her father fade away, the pain of broken marriages, to the tedious yet natural act of aging. Within her collection, where there exists a healthy mix of Judeo, Islamic, and Christian imagery and practices, Parsons poems show both the sweat and the gain that discipline offers, allowing the speaker to be present in life through all its moments. Furthermore, Parsons masters sound, diction, and imagery throughout these poems; it is evident that she has practiced and honed her own craft.
The first section opens with “Smudge” where the speaker lights “…sage bound with thread from my grandmother’s / sewing box. Smoke rise, melt of burden, bellows nearest my heart, my length, woodsy / sweet.” The speaker walks through her home cleansing the “odd things he left behind…” The “he” being her partner of over twenty years, with the final image capturing the solitude and sudden singleness of the speaker,
As for me, I’ll root in my little Eden,
a
bowl of ashes to catch the new moon,
crow
feather on the sill, the remains
flapping
off, mateless.
Family, whether it is a father, granddaughters, or former husband, all make appearances in the collection. The speaker has reached that point in life where enough time has passed to welcome back a first husband as in “Confluence. ” The poem opens with the metaphor of two rivers joining -- the Clinch and the tributary Powell, just as this once estranged couple now shares a meal, “the rope less taut between us -- / knot by knot, he mends memory’s seine” with the layered meaning of seine performing much work in such a small space, as Parsons does throughout the collection.
As opposed to dodging grief (which is often our first reflex), the speaker in Candescent turns towards her grief, absorbs it, and reckons with it. In “The Only Way,” with an epigraph from Rumi, “There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” the speaker “[Honors her] grief with ragged breath and privation / in the body’s dark cell despite how the blithe / word cries enough.” The assonance of “despite” and “blithe” force the reader to semi-howl, slowing the line and making us pay attention. And the redemption is that the speaker’s practice pays off, both literally and metaphorically. In the final poem of the opening section, “The First Night Pain Doesn’t Wake Me” the speaker notes the ongoing “ache in [her] hip” is suddenly gone not due to only the “ice, yoga’s cat and child, / tai chi’s white stork…” but because
…I scraped my bowl
empty of longing, until I sat in the dust
busking my tarnished tune and bowed
in gratitude for ache, for moan, for loss
at the hot marrow…”
In section two of the collection we find the speaker on her own “Damascus Road” where she is lost in thought “thinking of / Judy Blue Eyes,” and jolted back to the moment after reading her neighbor’s written complaint about the speaker’s “burning bushes” that block her view to the road. After all, it is a life and death issue, as her neighbor has almost been “T-boned three times.” The speaker, “swaddled in grief and remorse” has neglected the burning bushes, allowing them to grow too big and block the road. It is in this poem where she compares herself to Saul turned Paul, “…who am I but my own weary / traveler transformed, blasted new into traffic // without looking both ways?”
Just because the speaker finds her way through the pain does not mean that life is free of suffering. In “Enough” we watch as the good shepherd, “the dying dog” brings the estranged couple back together for the beloved dog’s final breath,
on the flowered rug, his bag of bones
flown
or sunken wherever the spirit lights –
even
that of a dog is holy, my crook
and
shepherd unto the psalmed hills.
Again, Parsons’ use of diction conjures the holy, regardless of religious tradition, forcing the reader to see the Divine in all aspects of life.
The ability to breathe, to be present, also allows for joy to flow, and the love the speaker has for her granddaughters spills forth in the playful diction and rhyme within “I Love You Like a Dragon,” I love you:
…In mountain’s toes
that scoop earth’s foes, scales raging blustery
skies slice down to burning questions---chocolate
or apple pie? In hot breath, crafty yellow eye,
I set the meatiest afire. I love you bold and bolder…
The passion of “I Love you Like a Dragon” leads into one of my favorite poems in this collection, which is more or less a manifesto, “Stand Up.” It is here where the speaker reckons with her former, docile self who was a “walker on eggshells, the biter of lips, the please pleaser,” who turns into a woman who is neither silent nor meek, who
pause,
the unturned cheek, the unshut eye,
who
digs her heels in this wide-awake
moment
and lets the mother tongue fly.
“Stand Up” is a poem that every woman should read aloud and often, with gusto. For it is in this poem when the speaker fully comes alive into her Self – the Self that is referenced in “Oracle,” where the enjambed line joins the first and second stanza of the poem, “Though nothing is fair in the dream of life, // our waking akin to a dream, said the Buddha, acceptance of what is, our only magick wand.”
The closing poem in the final section, “With Me” encapsulates the collection. While we opened to the speaker cleansing her house with sage, this final poem has the speaker carefully building “the home of myself,” acknowledging “bones of contention,” and the “entre chien et loup,” or time of the day “between dog and wolf, world and otherworld, my dusk,” – the time of life which the speaker now inhabits. She has witnessed and felt the loss of relationships, the loss of her father, of her good shepherd of a dog, but simultaneously knows the gift of discipline, the joy of granddaughters and the sounds and beauty of the South, and her upcoming “last ecstasy” will pass “into blessing, into hard surrender.”
These poems invite the reader to return to them, just as one turns to her most comforting scripture or to the daily practice of meditation or yoga. Layered with imagery and allusions, deft diction, and a love of sound, this is a collection I will keep close to my bed; a bedrock for when things do not go my way, but instead a reminder to embrace “acceptance of what is, our only magick wand.”
Rosemary Royston, author of Splitting the Soil (Finishing Line
Press, 2014), resides in northeast Georgia with her family. Her poetry has been
published in journals such as Split Rock
Review, Southern Poetry Review, Appalachian Heritage, Poetry South, KUDZU, NANO
Fiction, and *82 Review. She’s an
Assistant Professor of English at Young Harris College. https://theluxuryoftrees.wordpress.com/