Chapter 8
Savoy to Resolution Blue
Let’s bring into blue the true blue. Of what it takes to soothe and mend.
How do we move beyond our pain to receive comfort? How do we make the journey from despair to hope, grief to joy? How do we truly learn to forgive, as hard as it might seem to forget?
Let Jason Eng Hun Lee “make you paper cranes”. What beauty poetry becomes when it lets in the light, affords us that same light. We witness the same distilled translucence that surfaces deep intimations in José Duarte’s “Three Poems”, excerpts reprinted from Observations, an erasure of C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed.
How, too, do we relate to the natural world, and try to repair what’s been damaged, retrieve what’s been lost? In Esther Vincent Xueming, Lisa Reily and Maroula Blades, we are confronted with such lushness of imagery, making for some exquisite ecopoetry today.
An admirer of the contemporary pastoral himself, Crispin Rodrigues lets his confessional lines percolate their pained yet healing moments. He writes: “I’m tearing / myself apart intentionally, just to see whether // midnight nurses me, or if I’m trying to sleep / more easily. Either way, I’m closing wounds.”
Constance Bourg // Maroula Blades
Crispin Rodrigues // Matthew Christopher Zhang
