Poems of Shadows and Light

This inspiring, interesting, moving and sometimes funny collection of poems comes from a group of friends meeting weekly to write about their encounters with cancer and with life. Sometimes all the structures we have relied on are taken away by pain and change; poetry can give us the chance to restructure things. In this book, a weaver launches her dreams into the treetops, an artist tackles a villanelle in his scanning chamber, a research chemist describes his chemotherapy in measured stanzas, an engineer writes of her widow's grief. A photographer records the details of beauty, an English teacher plays with form and rhyme, a counselor writes of unwrapping her new self. A mother undergoing surgery speaks to her daughter, an executive imagines the family supper table without him. A woman's visits to Poland and Canada give perspective on her origins and current life. As you will see from the poems in this book, a cancer diagnosis is not just numbers, and it is not just loss.