The Angles of Light: new & selected poems by Luci Shaw
Review by Orrin Judd

We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice
 each thing, so each thing gets noticed. . . so that Creation need not play to an empty house.

    -Annie Dillard


The key scene in M. Night Shyamalan's film Signs comes when Graham Hess
(Mel Gibson) and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) are discussing the implications of what seems to be an alien
visitation, signaled by a number of lights that have appeared over Mexico City:

People --- break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as 
more than luck or a coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence that there is Someone out there watching out
for them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck, a happy turn of chance. Well sure there are people in 
group number two are looking at those 14 lights in a very suspicious way. For them, the situation isn't fifty/ fifty
could be bad, could be good , but deep down they feel that whatever happens, they are on their own, and that
fills them with fear. 



Yeah, there are those people, but there's a whole lot of people in group number one. When they see those fourteen
lights they are looking at a miracle. And deep down they feel that whatever is going to happen, there will be Someone
there to help them, and that fills them with hope. 



So what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles,
or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or look at the question this way --- is it possible that there are no
coincidences?
Luci Shaw's poetry is based on the thrill of finding those signs in the everyday, of having faith that it is God who has
placed them there and hope because of that.



A few examples will serve to give the flavor of the batch and speak far more eloquently than can I:

We know this to start with:


If we understood everything we wouldn't
be baffled. But mystery lives; somehow
without witchcraft or chicanery

we collect sounds and colors in a skyward
dish, like fruit in a bowl, and channel them
into verisimilitude--faces talking at us

from the tube's glass eye. Hallways of fog
enfold us in enigma. And then, the marvel of
window glass--how can anything be

hard enough to stop the hand and
hold its smudge while letting through this
soft light? The one wheat kernel that

breeds a thousand--a miracle of
loaves over and over again.
The stars, invisible in the blind day

revealed, thick as pollen, by the absence
of light. A billion spiky grass blades that melt
into a perfectly flat horizon. The Holy Ghost

waking me in my bedroom, drenching my
dry heart with fluid syllables, breathing
flesh into the fetal bones of this poem.

Bubble


I watch it being blown, swelling and rising
from my grandson's red plastic ring, fresh-filled
with eager air, tenuous as just-spilled
dandelion silk, a fluid wobble, quite surprising

me with its likeness to our cosmic bubble, 
all greens and blues, each continent and sea
etched in bright enamel by God and gravity--
a film's fine iridescence fixed. The trouble

is: before the shivering, frail balloon has hovered
long it bursts in a star of spray that pricks my skin
with cool fireworks, so that, in vanishing, it winks
at my comparison just as the simile is offered.

But mind's a watercolor paper. This visual spasm
has brushed me with its indelible, swift
rainbow strokes of form and gleam. My visions shift
between the micro- and the macrocosm,

ephemeral both, as radiant as grace,
glass globules in the furnace air, both sealed
off after a creative breath, and then annealed,
floating their minor vessels into space.

Reading these poems awakens us to the wonder of the world around us and, if we've a mind to allow it, 
transforms the mundane into the miraculous.  You can't help but observe your surroundings more closely
and ponder existence more fiercely.  And it's certainly possible that you'll choose to be the kind of person 
who views it all as lucky chance and insists we're alone and nothing means anything.  But, there's also a 
possibility that you too will see signs and miracles and be infused with hope.  Ms Shaw enhances the latter
possibility.  Her poems, in that sense, are an extraordinary gift to the reader. 

© 2003