Candescent

by Linda Parsons

Fire is the fulcrum on which the losses in Candescent are bound and purified. Linda Parsons's fifth collection gathers the tinder of fallen idols and smudges her changed life with burning sage--the loss of a marriage, the long decline of a father into dementia, the passing of a beloved dog. Candescence smolders within, flown like ashes of the past. In this journey from grief to humility and discovery, she at last finds her dragon voice, bows to the impermanence that infuses our earthly time. We can carry grief on our backs or in our bodies, or we can allow it to illuminate and deepen our path forward. What lifts this collection into new territory is Parsons's conscious path to healing and acceptance through Buddhist meditation. Using the images of meditation is a way for her writing to act as a healing practice not only for herself, but for all who hear and read the poems, a laying on of hands and words, light begetting light.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2019

Reviews

[Monica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful poems about grief, loss, and remaining present through it all.

[Rita Quillen · Rating 5 out of 5]

INCANDESCENT is an amazing book, one of the best poetry books I've ever read. The poems are beautiful in both language and concept, and the arc of the book's artistry is wonderful. But even more stunning than the artistic perfection of the poems, it is the poet who astonishes most in this collection: the person who opens herself up to us and lets us see all the pain and horror she has recently gone through---an unwanted and completely unforeseen divorce and the loss of her father after a long battle with Alzheimer's. We watch in amazement and admiration as she collapses under the weight of her grief, anger, frustration, and fear and then, somehow, begins to rise again, stronger, wiser, bigger, cosmic in her example of how to be born again. This book is a guide and a testament to all that is best about human beings, about the possibility of recovery and renewal for all of us, no matter our circumstances. I highly recommend it.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda Parsons' Candescent burns with loss, pain, and redemption. She tangles and untangles beauty and truth in a net of fiery language and imagery. Her theme of metamorphosis, of losing and transforming what is precious to us, reveals that what we gain is not always what we expected, but rather something beyond what we started out to become. “We are good / amputees, efficient little starfish and lizards, // regenerating feet and tails in the shadows / where no one watches us spin and weep,” Parsons tells us. But also, “Give it up and out, the breath / no longer yours or mine, not caught / or held or sung but flown.” When reading her work, you will know you’re in the hands of an expert poet, one with vision and skill and a hefty dose of magic.

[Denton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Linda Parsons’ fifth collection of poetry, Candescent, begins as a three-legged story of grief. There is the loss of a 24-year marriage that she describes as an utter surprise after so many years. There’s the loss of her fourteen-year-old German shepherd, an ever-watchful presence that views the narrator as his sole sheep to protect until the end. And then there is the loss of her aged father.

The question of memory is just as important in these poems as the pure element of grief. How the two twist and turn upon each other! Before her father’s death, there is the earlier insult of lost memory. When Parsons visits him in his hospital, she must introduce herself. Often, he asks his daughter if they’re kin, recognizing a familiarity but unable to name her or their true relationship.

Memory and its many tricks enter the poems again in the aftermath of divorce. Perhaps no poem sums up the absence of a lover better than these lines from “Phantom.”

Ghost pain, phantom pain, a limb lopped
clean, the dead bee’s sting. We are good
amputees, efficient little starfish and lizards,

regenerating feet and tails in the shadows
where no one watches us spin and weep,
where no one sees me turn a corner

in the dark before bed, giving wide berth,
my body’s radar still beeping and flashing
to sidestep a bookcase no longer there.

In “The Only Way” Parsons writes, “Honor your grief with ragged breath and privation / in the body’s dark cell despite how the blithe / world cries enough.” And that is exactly what Parsons does in these poems. She honors her grief, but she also works her way through it.

As in real life, grief doesn’t disappear in these poems in any single instant. Rather, there are many shifting moments. One of the most exciting shifts occurs in the poem, “Stand Up.”

Lo these many years,
I the peacemaker, the walker on eggshells,
the biter of lips, the please pleaser, the clay
not the molder, the stream not the bank,
the moss not the rock, the stern not the bow,
queen of if only I’d said, if only I’d done.
Lo I say unto you, I’m done with sit down,
sit down, done with the broom and its dust,
old love and its rust, the future walking right
out the door. Hear me, I’m here with a voice
from the gloom, the moon-filled room, rise
of wing to beat the band, however long
I must stand is how long I’ll rock,
rock, rock the boat.

Aside from the powerful narrative that emerges in this collection, Parson’s language is always delightful. She has a knack for sounds and rhythm, and she has the skill to employ all of these elements of craft without ever taking away from the poems’ accessibility. Candescent is a power collection, a perfect beacon to help readers enter into the new year.

[Felicia Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some collections of poems I like to read through, almost in one sitting, to find the arc of meaning and to see how what I am given to ponder or worry about in the first pages works itself out as the pages turn. Thus, in terms of its narrative thread and themes, a book can draw me in. Candescent is that sort of book because we begin with grief and end with grief accommodated within the residence of a life that is like a house with many rooms, not just that one room where an absence resides. A great loss accommodates and shape-shifts and makes room for memories and, with grace, the present. At the same time I say I like to read a book through, I would recommend savoring each poem in this collection closely, one by one, not necessarily all in the same day. I found returning to one or another to be equally interesting. Each poem you turn to in this collection, even out of turn, even randomly, will take you deep into a brilliant and compassionate mind at work, making sense. Reading the poems, we begin to make sense with the poet, even with a loss that seems unfathomable. The language of the poems--evocative imagery based in memory, myth, life experiences, philosophy, the domestic, the natural—combines with a syntax that sometimes makes me feel the way I feel when I read a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. See “Smudge,” for example. The words are palpable, not just mental but also visceral. Many times, in other poems, I follow the path of the accumulation of phrases both controlled and free and freeing. The effect is always to go deep. Who should read this book? Linda Parsons says it best in a preface when she notes how use uses “writing to act as a healing practice not only for myself, but for all who hear and read it, a laying on of hands and words, of light begetting light.” Light begets light in this collection, and you might (as I did) find yourself getting closer to thinking about an unresolved grief or an ordinary source of solace, given permission by the candescence here.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection glows with such thoughtful and poignant musings, exquisitely crafted with illuminating images, rendered even more luminous when read aloud, especially when given voice by the poet herself.

“I beware the end is near, the end of silence
of reticence of swallowing it down, choking
on what can’t be told in mixed company.
I’ll be clearing my throat, unbending
my knee, strapping my heart on my sleeve.
The one speaking aloud who sings without
pause, the unturned cheek, the unshut eye,
who digs in her heels in the wide-awake
moment and lets the mother tongue fly.”
—from “Stand Up,” p. 69

Favorite Poems:
“Smudge”
“Divine Rods”
“Traveling Through”
“My Father Asks If We’re Dead” (a masterpiece)
“Kinpeople”
“The Only Way”
“New Dog Under Gibbous Moon”
“The First Night Pain Doesn’t Wake Me”
“The Home That Can’t Be Lost, the Gold That Never Stops Shining”
“On Fire”
“Swept”
“The Art Of Meditation in Tennessee”
“The Buddha Gives His Fire Sermon at the Retreat Center in Tazewell, Tennessee”
“Contrary”
“Stand Up” (wowza!)
“Oracle”
“Intervention”
“Near Drowning”
“Wayfinder”
“Into the Water”
“Be Peace”
“Dogma”
“No Grief”