To Illuminate the Way

"I have learned life is stones / as well as flowers," states Wanda Praisner in "After Reading a Line from Dante in a Florence Restaurant," from her deeply moving collection, To Illuminate the Way. These poems lead us through darkness and light, joy and sorrow and suggest with language that is wise, precise, and often heartbreaking, that life is to be "devoured." In "Hiroshima Peace Park," the final poem, Praisner writes of "candles in rice paper lanterns ... flowing out to sea, / bringing light to dark." With both authority and passion Wanda Praisner takes us on a similar journey over seas of grief and joy and despair and hope, demonstrating and celebrating that, through it all, "we remain afloat." To Illuminate the Way is why we read and why we need poetry. Edwin Romond, Author of Alone with Love Songs In To Illuminate the Way, Wanda Praisner contemplates one of life's paradoxes: "Let in the light, and you see the dust." Light reveals darkness, dust, death, and yet the reverse is also true: grief illuminates the way. Praisner's college-age son Stephen died while he was training for a triathlon, and "we plunged into darkness," she writes, "earth closing over us." And yet that devastating loss becomes her candle, her "lodestar," her "armada of fireflies"-whether she's visiting The Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, a parking lot in Scotland or the ruins of Angkor. "We live in our lives, day by day, / someone said, but I mark mine by nights." She's spent a "lifetime of running out there alone, free, /earth and sky mine for the length of the run." Grief is her lantern. To read her deft poems is to run with her, following her light. Lois Marie Harrod, author of Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis If, as Dickenson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers," then Grief must be the thing with claws. A lesser poet than Wanda Praisner might only have expressed her grief, but Praisner is not a lesser poet. While her sorrow reveals itself, she never gives in to the maudlin or sentimental. As she reflects on loss, her poems take on the world that has taken away so much, and she is stronger for it. "It is said we steer star to star, not land to land..." she writes. "I have learned life is stones as well as flowers." Peter E. Murphy, Founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University