The Secret Road: Walking with Persephone by Barbara Segal

These beautifully constructed poems by Barbara Segal are magically tuned, layered with multi-level meaning, and contain a gorgeous lyrical precision that overflows with music.  Her language is one of nuance and delicacy, fresh and delicious, crafted from intense observation.  Far more than a book of poems about Persephone and her spiritual journey alongside the author, this is a book of poems that explores the self against the experienced landscape, the price that is required to realize and obtain one’s spiritual freedom, and transcendence.   Elegant, classical, innovative, this book of poetry will not disappoint.  Congratulations are in store for Barbara Segal for this outstanding first book, The Secret Road: Walking with Persephone.  Take your time and savor the sonics, her expertise to intuitively break lines in just the right place, her diction that comes from a deep love of language and natural sense of music; you too will be amazed.

–Gladys L. Henderson, Suffolk County Poet Laureate 2017-2019, Walt Whitman Birthplace Poet of the year, 2010

Imagining Persephone’s separation from the natural world and her yearning to be with her mother, Barbara Segal brings to life the beauty of nature in her rich lyricism born of her keen observation of sound and sight. Persephone makes us see life in every wing beat and rain cloud, bloom and wash of sky. In her evocative lines, Segal brings us back to the elemental world, even if we are “split / pulled apart” by grief and darkness. Joy and color dwell with sorrow and despair. The poems become a testament to the poet’s belief in our regeneration; if nature can recover, so can we.

–Pramila Venkateswaran, Author of Thirtha, Trace, and The Singer of Alleppey.

The Secret Road: Walking with Persephone is a beautiful collection of poems by Barbara Segal about the spiritual link between the author and the goddess of nature.  Segal shows her own sensitivity to nature in many poems, including “Hearing the Winter Night” with lyrical phrases such as stars so far…but I hear their song.  In “Our Sacred Path” she compares the goddess’s caring for the dead in the Underworld with her own volunteer work in hospice, Together we minister to the dying, honor the sacredness of life and death.  The poet has woven the stories of a mythical goddess who brings spring to Earth with poems about her own deep love of nature within this enthralling book.  The Secret Road is calling, won’t you answer?

–Evelyn Kandel,Nassau County Poet Laureate