Pan’s Dance
New and Selected Poems
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2020
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Publisher's Description
The poems in this collection are selected from previous collections by the author and include new work. This juxtaposition becomes thematic as the reader leaves studies in esoteric musings on nature, art, and myth to take a deeper look at the word study itself. These later poems, written during the final months of a doctorate in philosophy, take the word from the desk to the bedroom to outdoor landscapes and suburbia, in order to relay the teachings and/or philosophical journey of life on a deeply spiritual and eco-religious level. In this way, the intellect and the soul share a correspondence not always afforded in the everyday of our living. The collection also includes a short postscript of poems which considers an architecture of poetics to bring the outside in and vice versa.
Endorsements (4)
“Pan’s Dance: New and Selected Poems by Rebecca Kylie Law focuses on human relations through a vision of the natural world. Or so it would appear but really the central subject is nature beyond human life. Birds sing throughout the book but always in the distance. Even in our ecstatically lit room, the light reflects what Law sees as the ‘deeper hues of closure.’ The soul appears not in a human figure but in a sparrow and Christ cries again, ‘It is finished.’ But all’s not lost. Regret is shaped by kindness and there is, ‘For every day, a turned stone.’”
“In her poetry Rebecca Law finds stillness and beauty in the ordinary. She reminds us that in a chaotic world we can all be a ‘chance witness to the beautiful.’”
“Rebecca Law is simultaneously palpable and ethereal; her holy nights abundant with birds, trees, the elements, stars; and within rather than about the seasons, their moods and words. In her poems, evocation can double for anguish, and anguish for ecstasy, and ecstasy for sorrow. A poetry striving to steer exclamation to the word, and breathlessness toward language.”
“Rebecca Law’s Pan’s Dance is a distillation of work old and new, but it is a collection unified always by a soft, sensitive, echoic bewilderment at the actual world and ‘behind the brightness, the forms which are, shining.’ Law’s poems trace the membrane of encounter between interior and exterior, sensibility and perception, where ‘a flood of gentle light / into a room can seem coming / from an outstretched hand.’”
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