Leaving Lumberton
Ebook
Lumberton is a real town in an area historically denuded by clear-cut logging where the abused spirit of the land pervaded both place and people. The poems in this book explore various kinds of abuse and spiritual impoverishment as well as growth of awareness and healing. The journey from desolation toward wholeness proceeds in ordinary ways: waiting quietly like a bare field under a wide sky, noticing the budding lilac, or simply taking the next first step. We can leave our Lumbertons.
“Our lives are often defined by moments of fragile hope and new life breaking through struggle, pain, and loss. These poems beautifully take the reader to some of those empty places we either know or can relate to and whisper, ‘Here, too, is grace and a glimmer of hope.’”
—Scott Leannah, canon for ministries, Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee
“To read Sheryl Slocum’s verse is to kneel with her beside life’s rushing stream and watch, fascinated, as she plunges a dented pan into its depths. Up comes the dross of experience, whose clotted soil and minerals Slocum rinses in icy water until, at the tip of a finger turning blue, you see it: a gleam of the element she came for.”
—David Southward, author of Apocrypha
“There’s a fullness of language in Sheryl Slocum’s poems, a fullness deeply rooted in wisdom and a loving commitment to life—even when life brings what’s hard to accept. Traversing the uneven terrain of nature, the human heart, and beyond, these poems offer up, time and again, profound ideas, images, or insights that amply testify to the steady course and living excellence of Slocum’s art.”
—Mark Zimmermann, author of Impersonations
“In Leaving Lumberton, the poet struggles to break free of a bleak existence. Ruined bodies and destruction dominate; lives are haunted by an ‘unseeable enemy.’ Then Sheryl Slocom enters a more personal world defined by real and metaphorical horizons: leaving a daughter at college, the planting of crops, the release of death. Finally, she writes of rebirth, stars, gleaming fountains, churches full of music instead of desolation. I was pulled in by these masterful poems.”
—Jan Chronister, author of Decennia
- Title: Leaving Lumberton
- Author: Sheryl Slocum
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666759952, 9781666759938, 1666759937, 9781666759945, 1666759945, 1666759953
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666759952
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-18T20:31:29Z
Sheryl Slocum is the ESL coordinator at Alverno College in Milwaukee. She is a member of the Hartford Avenue Poets and of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets.