Current
PurchaseThe poems in Barbara Carlson’s Current take us under the surface into what lives below and just to the side of the material world. Her words do that miraculous thing of leading us to the edge of the unsayable, a “higher stillness” full of wonder. Carlson can move with the apparent ease of an aerialist from an abandoned nest, to a ruined mansion’s broken windows, to the centuries pressed into rock—each image becoming part of the next and enlarging the whole. This is a book of transformations—not loud splashy ones, but the deeper, more quiet ones that come out of silence and the astute attention that Simone Weil calls prayer, or Carlson herself calls the “windless unseen light that opens us within.” Whether on a Roman street or walking alongside a bog near her home, Carlson gives us a place “for the soul to lie down and be gathered.” In our way too transactional world, these poems are crucial, their currents carry us back to mystery, to the immensity of life, until “whatever it is that separates us fades away.”
—Betsy Sholl author of As if a Song Could Save You
Barbara Siegel Carlson’s spellbinding work pulls us deep into otherness without ever leaving the paths of trees, ravines, and clouds we know so well. Her poems have the quality of the miraculous: “I ask and holy that came to me in human form.” We experience this poet’s gifts as an immersion, her music and lyric voice welcoming the reader into stunning poems of wonder and grief, poems of the liminal that are fully alive in the hazard world and in mystery itself.
—Anne Marie Macari, author of Heaven Beneath
Barbara Carlson’s Current is a book of transformations—not bold splashy ones, but the deeper, more quiet ones that come out of looking closely, of being at home on the paths you walk regularly. Carlson herself calls the “windless unseen light that opens us within.” Whether on a Roman street or walking alongside a dog near her home, Carlson gives us a place “for the soul to lie down and be gathered.” In our way too transactional world, these poems are crucial, their currents carry us back to mystery, to the immensity of life, until “whatever it is that separates us fades away.”
—Betsy Sholl, author of As If A Song Could Save You
In Barbara Carlson’s Current, “Each scrap reveals an unseen world,” and only this fine poet’s sustained attention, and consummate craft, allows those “scraps” to speak. The poems of Current bless us with the knowledge that there is “a breath / that falls through the branches / and rises through the roots.” I feel challenged and strengthened by these poems, emancipated from dejection, encouraged by their insistence on tenderness and reverence. I am grateful for this book, which I know I will read again.
—Richard Hoffman, author of People Once Real
BLESSING A STONE
Stones along the dirt road shine
in quiet hues at dawn.
Their colors deepen
as the smell of light
revives on the moist road.
I pick one up and rub
the striations, as if I could draw
from the lines some message,
some memory of its passage.
Pausing, I close my eyes
and see the stars. I can almost
reach through the light
and dark particles that hold all I am
to know where I’m going.