Tragedies old and new weave a tiny Kentucky town into the center of the universe. Filled with passion, pain, and redemption, this novel is a classic. From the University Press of Kentucky: Acclaimed poet George Ella Lyon returns with a brilliant new collection that traces the arc of a woman's life from girlhood to mature womanhood.
Along the way she meets allies and guides including Dickinson, Woolf, Mary Travers, Grace Paley, and the giver of dreams. As sailors once navigated by the stars, so Lyon navigates by these luminaries. They are not distant, though.
Their light is always near. Alternately witty, tender, shocking, and visionary, Back to the Light reveals the reunion of body and spirit, truth and story. In the process, it demonstrates the power of poetry to liberate and to heal.
The specificity with which she re-creates a moment in each--whether noticing a third-grader at one of her school visits, or the moment at age five when an older boy sexually assaults her, or the way a stone she finds puts her in mind of Virginia Woolf's suicide--adds up to a cumulative epiphany by the collection's end, and offers an overriding sense of hope.
Back to the Light will be welcomed by many kinds of readers. It is visionary, highly accessible, and highly teachable. George Ella reminds us, in elegant George Ella style, how the country located just below the nose and just above the chin of a woman's face is a sparkling cave of galaxies.
