Lighting the Shadow By Rachel Eliza Griffiths Four Way Books, 2015 Reviewed by Cheryl R. Hopson Rachel Eliza Griffiths opens her fourth full-length collection, Lighting the Shadow, with the poem The Dead Will Lead Us, in which she writes, “This, / is what you must learn / by heart. The closed flesh / as commandment, a terra cotta / smear of fingerprints / praying along the blue cave.” The poet continues, Lighting the shadow, a woman crawls out beneath her own war. The Dead Will Lead Us is only one of the book’s many epigraphs. The speakers in these poems have come to tell us what we must learn by heart – that transgressions, violence, rage, and caustic elements and ideas will “crawl out” of the shadow to struggle “with this blow of light.” Griffiths’ collection is divided into four sections, Diaphanous Corpse, A Dark Race for Enlightenment, Verses From [...]
Cheryl Hopson
In the Event of Full Disclosure By Cynthia Atkins CW Books, 2013 REVIEWED BY CHERYL R. HOPSON Cynthia Atkins opens her second collection of poetry, In the Event of Full Disclosure, with a meditation on family love by early twentieth century poet, T.S. Eliot, who writes of such unions as “love that’s lived in, but not looked at, love within the light of which all else is seen, the love within which all other love finds speech.” “This love,” continues Eliot “is silent.” Enter Atkins, the poet/family woman (sibling, daughter, mother, wife), to break said silence and offer something of the same love, by which she herself sees and writes. In “Family Therapy (I)” the first of five poems demarcating the book’s themes of family, mental illness, love, shame, and centering, Atkins writes, I hold the secrets. I am the writer. I am the sister of a schizo- phrenic. My [...]