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.”
Advance readers of the book have been enthusiastic. Pit Pinegar says this:
“Lisa Sornberger’s poems are filled with what Carl Jung calls
the tension of oppositeslight and dark, body and spirit, grief and
joy, stones and feathers, the gifts of memory and the gifts of here-and-now.
Returning Light is a meditative collection that circles back on
its themes, not in repetitions, but variations. It is the work of a poet
who is not content to write only of what is or was, but who also contemplates
significance. Sometimes the poem poses the contemplation; sometimes it
follows the contemplation; often the poem is the contemplation.
Lisa Sornberger is a poet whose work is clear evidence of a life examined.”
The spirit of Returning Light is beautifully suggested by the
artwork on its cover, a painting entitled "Moongirl" by Sandy
Mastroni.
Lisa Sornberger decided to be a writer at the age of nine and weathered adolescence with the aid of the Muse. In her early twenties she met her future husband, John, also a writer, with whom she continues to share joy, much fun, and many adventures, which include house-building and restoration, far-flung traveling, snorkeling, gardening and beach-roaming. She has had an abiding interest in animal protection, its most apparent manifestation being the family of five cats with whom she and John co-habit in Willimantic, CT. For many years and in many capacities, she has helped the disabled; she has also been a licensed massage therapist. Through all of her activities, poetry has been a constant. She is a member of the Thread City Poets and has received several honors for her writing, among them a fellowship to the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, a scholarship to the Wesleyan Writers Conference, and selection to tour with the Connecticut Poetry Circuit’s student contingent. Lisa Sornberger’s work has appeared in literary journals such as the New York Quarterly, the New Virginia Review, Fairfield Review, Embers, and Common Ground Review. In 2004 her chapbook Stone and Feather was published.
Click here to read sample poems.
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