Light and Trials of Light by Cynthia Reeser

Finishing Line Press, 2010
Reviewed by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

Cynthia Reeser is a poet, visual artist, musician, and the Founding Editor of Prick of the Spindle. Her new collection of poems, Light and Trials of Light is a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press earlier this year. The collection is comprised of twenty poems which capture the world in such a way as to remind the reader that nothing we experience should be treated as minor or unimportant. For example, “The Amputees” is a poem that at first seems to be a simple recall of a forgotten memory. A mother is speaking to her child who was just a toddler when:

the men in orange suits
came, for our tiny
stand of trees,
the one (you won’t remember)
bordering our house/

Here the mother sounds as if she is telling a story to a group of small children, but this is not a fairy tale. Instead it more closely related to a horror film. In the stanzas that follow, the men in orange suits are not coming to harvest the trees, but rather to mangle and disfigure them:

On the edge of the field.
They came hacking,
sawing, scraping: reaping
limbs, but only just

on the side threatening
the power lines.
When they left,
limbs lay dripping
useless sap all over
this new battlefield.

The victims of this war are rarely mentioned, their wounds never spoken of, because for most people it is more important that their lights, appliances, and games work when they come home.

On every page Life and Trials of Light challenges the reader to reconsider our behavior, to look around us for clues on how to react to such things as death and change. The poem “Petals” feels like a lament for a lost loved one, and our expectation may be that this poem will end sadly; however, Reeser instead reminds us that there is hope and beauty in death:

Recalling boughs, your fragile limbs
reaching for light and air,
for sails blooming hushed in the strain
of multifoliate descent, plummeting
past memories that now rebound
in silence and in the staid river,
dolmens rebounding off nothing
Except last season’s foliage, now ground
into shade and mulch and dust,
into minerals now sent up through roses.

“The Year” ends with:

The lilac brush does not hide the
heaviness of rain. Keens itself,

for want of bygone seedlings dropped,
for loss of dove-pecked buds.

The poems that await the reader in Light and Trials of Light are beautiful, sometimes witty, and always filled with truth. Cynthia Reeser does not try to hide the ugliness of life, she admits that our world and our lives change, while encouraging us to find a way to move forward. The trees that lose half their bodies go on living, because the life cycle includes death: a rose is provided the minerals it needs to live, and the lilac brush recognizes that sometimes we are robbed of the things we hold dear, yet it does not give-up.

Light and Trials of Light is a short collection of poems, but it should not be overlooked.

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