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Shadow Light
Poetry. Native American Studies. "The natural elements are honored and reclaimed in all their vital glory in Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT. Water, land, wind, and language rise up and dazzle. Low splinters syntax and line to signal presence, absence, spirit, and light. These are also elegiac poems for a father, sister, and grandparents, and gloss the history and resilience of the Lenape, Cherokee, Cheyenne, and Kiowa people. Low translates nature into human song and back again. This is a riveting and urgent collection by an accomplished poet, who courts a hummingbird so that we may witness it 'bullet dive' and open a portal into another world."--Hadara Bar-Nadav
"Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT extends her poetics to the realm of natural Lyric embedded with Story. History embedded with Myth. English challenged with Native languages. Imagery enriched with Sound. Pop Culture meshed with ritual Culture. The built Environment genuflecting to the natural Environment. SHADOW LIGHT is masterful poetry by an accomplished poet; this is poetry I wish I had written myself."--Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
"Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT deals with sight, appearances, and apparitions. Shades slide through layers of history, layers of earth, sidewise in a single line, 'peripheral twilight / black-and-white lexicon / flicker flit freeze.' Low conveys liminal perceptions by leaving enough unsaid. In these painterly poems, physical features emanate tones and patterns. SHADOW LIGHT is brilliant--don't miss it."--Joseph Harrington
"SHADOW LIGHT is a sweep of polarities--life / death, past / present, upheaval / peace. This spot-on writing casts variegated light on our world--flycatchers, curlew, little people, opossum--and other travelers of day and night."--Diane Glancy
"Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT extends her poetics to the realm of natural Lyric embedded with Story. History embedded with Myth. English challenged with Native languages. Imagery enriched with Sound. Pop Culture meshed with ritual Culture. The built Environment genuflecting to the natural Environment. SHADOW LIGHT is masterful poetry by an accomplished poet; this is poetry I wish I had written myself."--Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
"Denise Low's SHADOW LIGHT deals with sight, appearances, and apparitions. Shades slide through layers of history, layers of earth, sidewise in a single line, 'peripheral twilight / black-and-white lexicon / flicker flit freeze.' Low conveys liminal perceptions by leaving enough unsaid. In these painterly poems, physical features emanate tones and patterns. SHADOW LIGHT is brilliant--don't miss it."--Joseph Harrington
"SHADOW LIGHT is a sweep of polarities--life / death, past / present, upheaval / peace. This spot-on writing casts variegated light on our world--flycatchers, curlew, little people, opossum--and other travelers of day and night."--Diane Glancy
- GenresPoetry
72 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2018
29 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 26, 2018
Denise Low is a national treasure -- a seasoned poet with a very original way of using language and landing on enduring imagery, her body of work is truly one of the great contributions among contemporary poets. This, her newest collection, is especially profound with great moments of delicate and workaday language, strong images, compelling rhythm, humor and tenderness, depth and breadth. Buy it and read it now! This is an important book for how we see and understand the world and the capacities of language to speak from and to that world.
February 13, 2018
Shadow Light by Denise Low is a mixture of lightness and darkness with overall positiveness in its expansive view of time and space. Despite historical horrors, empowering memories of tribe and family give hope. Nature is the saving grace, the soul, the eye of the beholder, a nearby comfort within easy reach. --Jim Potter, author of Taking Back the Bullet: Trajectories of Self-Discovery
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September 29, 2019The next instalment in my attempt to read everything by her. She has such an amazing poetic voice, and a very incisive way of seeing the natural world. My review would basically be titles of poems and long strings of keyboard mashing, so please imagine that right here.
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Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
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Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
December 2, 2018
Review of Denise Low’s Shadow Light. (Santa Fe: Red Mountain Press, 2018. 71 pages, paperback. ) ISBN 978-0-9985140-7-9
By Lindsey Martin-Bowen
Flint Hills Review. Issue 24: 2019. Emporia State University.
Winner of the 2017 Editor’s Choice Award
Subtly, ever so subtly, Denise Low melds the two extremes in the Shadow and Light metaphor of the title in her latest collection into each of the poems here. In fact, the title poem plays upon not only the bittersweet image of life, but of death, too, especially in the third through fifth stanzas:
Past shadows, where light glimmers
its celestial yellow, chiaroscuro,
my dead sister appears, back lit,
“With the other shades she first smiled”
Con quelle altr’ ombre pria sorrise,
her flicker of afterlife brilliant, light
not shadows. She stand beyond
as sun floods a treeline rift,
“Don’t you know you’re in Heaven?”
Non sai tu che tu se in cielo?
But shadows finally swallow light.
Canopy dims till only a trillium
ignites in the woods, a petaled spark
“which then broadens into a living flame”
che si dilate in flamma poi vivace.
In other collections, Low has penned poems that focus upon the land—not just the surface, but the geological foundation of the earth, plants, and animals living on the prairies. In more recent collections, she has emphasized an animal-human hybrid (the Jackalope) and human characters, especially American Indians, many of whom compose her genealogy. (This fifth-generation Kansan’s mixed heritage includes ancestors from the British Isles, Germany, the Delaware tribe (Lenape/Munsee).) Shadow Light continues her tradition.
Dedicating it “to all my relatives, through blood, memory, imagination, and spirit,” she included many poems, among them,“White Deer Chiaroscuro,” “Blue Birds at the River,” “Shadow Light,” “Sun Dog over Satanta, Kansas,” “Cheyenne County,” “Tree Swallows: Missoula,” “Quivira Way,” “Tailing Piles: Blackhawk, Colorado,” “Spring Burn, Wabaunsee County,” “Before the Gnadenhutten Massacre,” “Where the Dead Go,” Makarusa Medicine Wheel,” and “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County” about the landscape, locations, and Indians.
And yet, this collection also exhibits an evolution in style in several of the poems. Her minimalist poems, such as “Courtship” and In Utero” waste no words. Near the book’s conclusion, she hones poems to essentials often turning a noun into a verb for a more dramatic impact. For example, "Where the Dead Go" reveals how "ghost" and "kites" wield far more impact as verbs:
Snow petals ghost
the northern wind.
Among wild plums
my father's face kites
in wickerwork limbs
gray-eyed, trapped,
no escape as rains
huff roadside tracks.
Within twist of this
a chill flounce.
Beneath below within
where does he anchor?
Further, the usual mating of subject and verb in the image, “rains huff” adds to the poem’s intensity.
Moreover, Shadow Light is a strong collection from this award-winning poet and former Kansas Poet Laureate who has authored more than 35 books. It’s well-worth a read. Enjoy!
—Lindsey Martin-Bowen,
Where Water Meets the Rock and
CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison
By Lindsey Martin-Bowen
Flint Hills Review. Issue 24: 2019. Emporia State University.
Winner of the 2017 Editor’s Choice Award
Subtly, ever so subtly, Denise Low melds the two extremes in the Shadow and Light metaphor of the title in her latest collection into each of the poems here. In fact, the title poem plays upon not only the bittersweet image of life, but of death, too, especially in the third through fifth stanzas:
Past shadows, where light glimmers
its celestial yellow, chiaroscuro,
my dead sister appears, back lit,
“With the other shades she first smiled”
Con quelle altr’ ombre pria sorrise,
her flicker of afterlife brilliant, light
not shadows. She stand beyond
as sun floods a treeline rift,
“Don’t you know you’re in Heaven?”
Non sai tu che tu se in cielo?
But shadows finally swallow light.
Canopy dims till only a trillium
ignites in the woods, a petaled spark
“which then broadens into a living flame”
che si dilate in flamma poi vivace.
In other collections, Low has penned poems that focus upon the land—not just the surface, but the geological foundation of the earth, plants, and animals living on the prairies. In more recent collections, she has emphasized an animal-human hybrid (the Jackalope) and human characters, especially American Indians, many of whom compose her genealogy. (This fifth-generation Kansan’s mixed heritage includes ancestors from the British Isles, Germany, the Delaware tribe (Lenape/Munsee).) Shadow Light continues her tradition.
Dedicating it “to all my relatives, through blood, memory, imagination, and spirit,” she included many poems, among them,“White Deer Chiaroscuro,” “Blue Birds at the River,” “Shadow Light,” “Sun Dog over Satanta, Kansas,” “Cheyenne County,” “Tree Swallows: Missoula,” “Quivira Way,” “Tailing Piles: Blackhawk, Colorado,” “Spring Burn, Wabaunsee County,” “Before the Gnadenhutten Massacre,” “Where the Dead Go,” Makarusa Medicine Wheel,” and “Stomp Dance, Wyandotte County” about the landscape, locations, and Indians.
And yet, this collection also exhibits an evolution in style in several of the poems. Her minimalist poems, such as “Courtship” and In Utero” waste no words. Near the book’s conclusion, she hones poems to essentials often turning a noun into a verb for a more dramatic impact. For example, "Where the Dead Go" reveals how "ghost" and "kites" wield far more impact as verbs:
Snow petals ghost
the northern wind.
Among wild plums
my father's face kites
in wickerwork limbs
gray-eyed, trapped,
no escape as rains
huff roadside tracks.
Within twist of this
a chill flounce.
Beneath below within
where does he anchor?
Further, the usual mating of subject and verb in the image, “rains huff” adds to the poem’s intensity.
Moreover, Shadow Light is a strong collection from this award-winning poet and former Kansas Poet Laureate who has authored more than 35 books. It’s well-worth a read. Enjoy!
—Lindsey Martin-Bowen,
Where Water Meets the Rock and
CROSSING KANSAS with Jim Morrison
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews