Claiming Light and Darkness by Sally Witt

If poets celebrate the world they inhabit, Sr. Sally Witt finds stark beauty in a rust-belt neighborhood of “snow-bent daffodils” next to long-dark, dismantled steel mills. Row houses “huddle closer” in winter “than in lighter seasons.” Trees in the yards of “vacant, boarded, vandalized” houses still blossom in the spring, “defiant.”

Like Saint Francis, Sr. Sally addresses the sun, light, darkness, and the four seasons as “dear” friends.  The chapbook is aptly named. The poet claims Light and Darkness.  She understands that from the beginning of creation, light was called out of darkness.  “Doesn’t your heart leap,” she asks, “at what the unexpected winter light reveals, / at beauty deeper than death or any darkness!” Even in the short, cold days of winter, light gleams through maple leaves and pine needles, “filled with sun.” And the poet reminds us that this greenery finally “come[s] to understand its message:

Do not fear.

Remember, you are drenched

Indelibly in love.”

As are we all.

–Sr. Rita M. Yeasted, SFCC, Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, La Roche University

In these verses, delicate and elegant, love animates sun and blossom, triumphing even when abandoned houses fall into decay and steel mills rust. Witt’s vision is quiet and holy, infused with beauty and grace which endure.

–Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Poetry Editor, The Christian Century

These poems follow the light—from morning to evening, from winter to spring and round again, like fine paintings or a walk with a friend. They are in place and of place, as Sally Witt considers the quality and life of sunbeams traveling 92 million miles, and of the things the light exposes, then hides, such as trees and steel mills and kitchen interiors. Linked to religious life and reflective of Native American theology, this poet lives in, and ushers us into, the world of all living beings, and the variety of seeing and experiencing them. Here is the thing itself, living moments bathed in light.

–Susan Sink, poet, author of The Way of All the Earth, Habits, and H is for Harry