Returning Light

The poems in Returning Light, Lisa Sornberger's remarkable second book, will leave you a different person when they have entered your blood and bones. In their "stone of sadness and lightness of flight," they dare to enter "the chamber where suffering dwells" and dare to leave that chamber behind, reminding us that "our birthright / is to delight, to shine, / to be unafraid of being flesh." Nor are despair and joy the only opposites coexisting here. These poems allow the light of another world to shine through, suggesting mysteries lying just beyond our reach, but they also paint the lush colors of this world in all their permutations. Here, we find the spectral white horses with whom the poet flies at night, but also the wildcat that roars in her belly, the bird that flies out of her throat. And Sornberger's verse celebrates both the adventure of lighting out for the territory and the luxury of returning to the hearth. Nor does the seriousness of her themes prevent a playful smile from breaking through. So many contraries (not the poet's alone but also our own) revel in this bountiful book that in the end it is, like the gentian sky evoked by the author, "a hand / palm up, fingers opening, / giving us everything."