The Wavering Fledge of Light
Ebook
This collection of poems begins with the Sonoran Desert, a return to personal and social histories. Poems crisscross the desert to bear witness to the live repercussions of past and contemporary events, from Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917 to the border country one hundred years later. The vision widens to chart a contemplative orientation between the desert as a place of refuge and beauty, and the desert, in Thomas Merton's words, as "the country of madness." The elegiac spirit that runs through the collection is the same one that searches for tenors of human connection and solidarity. Children play a central role in this project. Traveling far beyond the southwest, from Olaszfalu, Hungary, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, histories and communities are experienced as interspersing realities. Poems seek to be responsive to and responsible for memory in its many iterations, including the birth of language itself, so that the meaning of home ground can be revealed. In this way, the desert is both a geographic place as well as an interior, more expansive, and difficult to define terrain, a literal and figurative desert.
“Each of Lawrence Wray’s poems is on an urgent errand to the heart of the matter. Whether narrative, meditative, elegiac, or quietly celebratory, whether pursuing ‘the loss that binds us’ or ‘the things that save us,’ each is exquisitely paced, full of unexpected juxtapositions, vibrant with sensory detail, and spun out in language that feels newfound. The Wavering Fledge of Light leads into the most necessary, magical, and resonant depths of human experience.”
—Jeanne Marie Beaumont, author of Letters from Limbo
“Lawrence Wray’s poems are visionary in the truest sense of the word. They show us visions of places, times and scenes that are, at once, in time and timeless, present and historical, personal and mythic, fanciful and factual. What is particularly remarkable is that all these domains interpenetrate. The poet treads lightly but firmly and achieves in poem after poem a resonance that is uncanny.”
—Baron Wormser, author of The History Hotel
“Lawrence Wray is a highly skilled, learned, visionary poet whose way with words will take one’s breath away. For anyone who loves language used in service of art, in service of the highest reaches of the human spirit, or who simply endeavors to ‘make sense of it all’ without a scintilla of sentimentality or reductiveness, here is a poet to celebrate and to cherish.”
—Gray Jacobik, author of Eleanor and The Banquet: New and Selected Poems
“There is a yearning in this accomplished book to give a voice to life’s most crucial, true, and yet ineffable moments. Lawrence Wray writes about a world ‘that cannot be held close enough,’ which is always on the verge of disappearing or has already vanished, leaving only traces behind. His language gives shape (elegantly and convincingly) to what is always at the verge of what can be said, is always that is, at The Wavering Fledge of Light.”
—Robert Cording, author of Without My Asking
- Title: The Wavering Fledge of Light
- Author: Lawrence Wray
- Publisher: Resource Publications
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666756883, 9781666756869, 1666756865, 9781666756876, 1666756873, 1666756881
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666756883
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-06-20T23:05:11Z
Lawrence Wray is a poet, teacher, and parent. His poetry has been internationally published, and he teaches high school literature and composition. He has degrees in comparative literature from Binghamton University and English literature from Duquesne University. Following his studies, he worked for a local peace and justice organization, The Thomas Merton Center. He grew up in Arizona and now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is an active volunteer for the community food bank.