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Shadow of the Living Brightness
Poems about unknowing and the uncertainty of in-between states
Shadow of the Living Brightness takes its title from Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s description of the ‘sensation of God’s presence.’ Béchard manages to make this and other ineffables effable in this collection of poems that offers multiple dimensions of knowing and feeling that are at once fugitive and palpable. How to limn the tension between stepping into and away from the world? What do we not see in our seeing? How to sound sound? The book explores, with the dazzling honesty only a slant approach can achieve: grief, withdrawal, hope, mental illness, suicide. This is a book about unknowing, about uncertainty and in-between states. At the same time, the aching beauty of things and the language that evokes them can fire up a sense of radical attention and connection. Here it’s the very fallibility of set identities and truths that invites our re-engagement with their wobbly splendour.
‘Shadow of the Living Brightness creates a melancholic mood that somehow never turns sentimental. . . Bechard writes like a twenty-first-century Rilke with Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s bravery and an affinity for Keats.’ – Catherine Owen, Bookworm
‘Bravura and vulnerability galvanize in equal parts in Dominique Béchard’s visionary second collection, Shadow of the Living Brightness. Wary of the world and its ephemera, the speaker in these poems describes with exquisite originality and accuracy the spectral, the ordinary, the impermanent. What a heavenly fiasco, Béchard writes in a gorgeous love poem that swerves into unforced comedy – I swear I saw my boiled egg tremble in nervous glee” – and then back to questions of the spirit conveyed through Béchard’s inimitable metaphor-making. This sinuous movement of mind characterizes almost every poem in a collection I admire for its mournful brilliance
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Details
Dimensions:
88 Pages
8.0in * 5.0in * 0.3in
0.31lb
Published:
September 22, 2026
Publisher:
ISBN:
9781552455319
Featured In:
Language:
eng
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