Harvesting Fog
Luci Shaw sees in the natural world a dynamic incarnation of God's love. Luminous poems, of faith richly woven into the fabric of daily life and change, full of surprises and moments of delicious holy mischief. --Betsy Sholl, PoetIntensely personal, her poems also draw deeply on the legacy she has embraced as an heir to Herbert, Hopkins, Dickinson, and others whose shadows fall gently across her lines, giving them texture and adding to their quiet contemporary beauty --Marilyn McEntyre, Teacher and WriterEnvision a long life through imaginative changes of lens. Light becomes a bookish beetle, the Infant Jesus is "a small sack of God," and idea is "a glitter of ash" to be flung over the ocean --Jeanine Hathaway, PoetOne might argue with Heidegger that only in poetry can Being achieve adequate articulation, find a "local habitation and a name," become known. For Shaw, whose poems so brilliantly and movingly locate authentic Being in the forms and processes of nature, the lyric impulse often approaches the incarnational. --B.H.Fairchild, Poet and TeacherAcutely observed, full of fidelity to the nature of things and yet each observation suggesting or opening towards something more than itself. These poems will be a real personal resource to their individual readers but some of them,like Kenosis, Then and Now, The Prayer of the Upright, will be a real liturgical resource as well.  --Malcolm Guite, Poet and Singer-SongwriterLuci Shaw sees in the natural world a dynamic incarnation of God's love. Luminous poems, of faith richly woven into the fabric of daily life and change, full of surprises and moments of delicious holy mischief --Betsy Sholl, PoetIntensely personal, her poems also draw deeply on the legacy she has embraced as an heir to Herbert, Hopkins, Dickinson, and others whose shadows fall gently across her lines, giving them texture and adding to their quiet contemporary beauty. --Marilyn McEntyre, Teacher and WriterEnvision a long life through imaginative changes of lens. Light becomes a bookish beetle, the Infant Jesus is "a small sack of God," and idea is "a glitter of ash" to be flung over the ocean. --Jeanine Hathaway, PoetAt a recent literary festival I had the privilege of hearing Luci Shaw read from her lately published collection of poems, Harvesting Fog. Shortly afterward, standing near a table where she was signing copies of her books, I overheard an admirer's brief exchange with the warm and personable poet, who had just thanked her for attending the reading. "Thank you," the young woman replied, her voice full of emotion, "for helping us to see." It was an appropriate expression of gratitude, I thought, towards a writer whose singular giftedness involves prodigious attention to the minute, mundane, and easily overlooked details, and the ability to discover unexpected meaning, even deep spiritual significance, in them all. The effect is awe-inspiring to those of us unused to straddling that fault line where the mundane and the mysterious bump and jostle one another and occasionally overlap...The book's fifty-nine poems are divided into two sections , "Harvest" and "Fog,"...In the first section, "Harvest," Shaw is especially concerned with the wonders of nature and physical, sensory experiences as well as with artistic creation. For instance, what begins as the poet's playful observation, in "Prism," of the movement of a bit of reflected light--a rainbow beetle--across a page of text eventually takes on the tone of an artist's heartfelt invocation of the muse: "I welcome you, small envoy of colored light,/ as you begin to write your own story on my skin" (9).Some of the poems, particularly in the "Fog" section, are piercing in their poignancy on the topic of aging, loss, and the approach of death. Still, while "Leaf, Fallen" and "To the Edge" evoke the sorrow of inevitable endings, they also acknowledge the freedom of releasing those to whom we cling, and the fortitude to be found in belief in the eternal. And Shaw's "Weight Loss," even encourages a sense of humor about it all, an agreement with and embrace of "life's/ Gentle finality--/Its gradual knife" (16).Where Shaw leaves off meditating on the divine and timeless, she quickly returns to exploration of the human and fleeting. The poems in Harvesting Fog point to all kinds of brief, sacramental encounters with people, objects, and places... The almost-meeting of two tourists on a bus is hailed as "a fragment in history, a swift /receding. That flash-point when/ the future brushes against the past..." (78). In other moments... the ministrations of a masseuse are perceived as a spiritual cleansing and anointing... symbols of Christ are seen everywhere, from a floral tattoo to the image of Dante floating in the Arno River, arms flung wide.  These and other images build upon one another in Shaw's work, reinforcing her ideas with powerful symbolism. The result is an emerging sense of the beauty and poignancy of this world, its mystery and meaningfulness, with perhaps just a hint of the sweet savor of the world to come ... a whiff of heaven.  --Englewood Review (Vol3, #23), Jennifer Merri Parker, 2010