published 2005
Available online through VolumesDirect.com >
Shadows Light, Poetry and Clay, a collection of Carson’s early and new poems illustrated with colour photographs of her sculptures, was published in the spring of 2005.
This collection was reviewed by Jan Bailey, American poet, as “confronting the silences; through poignant images grounded in daily life we fall wholly into uncensored emotion.”
Shadows Light has received excellent reviews with fulfilled requests for readings from Maine to Manitoulin Island.
Excerpt
Responses & Reviews
Jan Bailey, Author, Paper Clothes, Midnight in the Guestroom, Heart of the Other.
“In Shadows Light the poet confronts the silences; through poignant images grounded in daily life we fall wholly into uncensored emotion.”
Ruth Goldsmith, Contact Magazine, Older Women’s Network, Spring 2006, and in Canadian Women’s Studies/Les Cahier de la Femme Summer/Fall 2006, vol. 25, No’s 3,4.
If you love poetry add this gem to your collection. Take this book with you on a crowded subway train and allow Ann to transport you to another dimension. Indeed, Ann is an ideal travel companion. When you read Shadows Light you will be embarking on a journey and along a road you may never have traveled before, dip into a treasury of images, into feminist rage, and comments on family life that will surely strike a responsive chord. Not only a poet. Ann is a also a sculptor. Interspersed among the poems are photographs of her sculptures – like walking through an art gallery. Each poem paints a landscape, an experience, an emotion as Ann recreates the key moments in her life, giving them to us so that we may savour them to capture and experience their sorrow, their splendour and their joy. You certainly will never forget this book!
Senator Landon Pearson, Author, Children of Glasnost, Letters From Moscow.
“Spare, intense and deeply resonant.”
Kathy Ross, Sculptor.
“I stood in the living room reading a poem and my heart turned over as my dinner guests waited
for their coffee. Powerful sculptures.”
Toronto Women’s Bookstore. Shadows Light, by Ann Elizabeth Carson.
This collection of poetry from Canadian author Ann Elizabeth Carson intersperses her poetry with images of her sculptures, each accentuating the other. Reflecting on loss, family, connections, and the act of writing itself, this book is a companion for writers and readers. Autumn, 2006
Marjorie Muir, Poet’s Cove, New Monhegan Press, Maine.
What a pleasure to read your poems. Thank you. “Then and Now” is especially wonderful for what it says about youth and age and how they co-exist in us. “Maine Puffin Watch” is a vivid, closely observed descriptive poem. I hope the island will continue to inspire your beautiful nature poems, as well as the poignant reflections on love and loss. Selections will be published in Poet’s Cove as well as in the New Monhegan Press. Autumn, 2005
Margo Little, The Sudbury Star, 18/07/05
Carson’s poetry distils her life experiences and gives shape to universal questions as she explores the dualities in human existence. The landscapes and seascapes of Islands – Manitoulin in Ontario and Monhegan in Maine – have served as both inspiration and solace. Ann’s poetry is accompanied by photographs of her sculptures that illustrate her central themes of the necessity for a connection to nature, to community and to deeply suppressed feelings of isolation and loss. As the title of the collection implies, the poet is striving for balance. Although she acknowledges the moments when “blackness inks my soul” she always walks towards the light. Readers are left with images of “everyday pleasures” and “the comfortable sounds of the Earth’s living.”
Bill McLean, The Beach Metro News, 6/9/05
Ann Carson’s latest book of poetry is accompanied by beautiful colour photographs of her own sculptures. Her poems range from the simple and direct as in Moment: “It’s snowing on me, lightly touched I memorize the flakes, upward into their own world. Chilled galaxy of silence.” to longer prose-poem works such as Summer Day or Turn Over, or more intimate portraits of human existence such as the musings about home reflected in Baby Boomers, or the feeling of loss and comfort in What Child Comes Back. Ann Carson also works in charcoal and watercolour and examples of her work in these media will be published in her next book.
Jim Moodie, The Manitoulin Expositor, 27/07/05
Shadows Light, a new collection of earthy yet elegant poems explores themes both dark and uplifting. The nature poems are celebratory, but crisply observed, and sometimes sharp in tone as well. Carson’s granddaughter calls them “nature with an edge.” Often the language is wonderfully precise and vivid: ” A beetle clicks over grass”, “the whisper of pens”, “the scrape of paper tissues”. Elsewhere it is more abstract and mysterious, but equally compelling: “the benison of the night air”, “wind whispering across lacey places, carved by loss.” The engaging, intelligently crafted poems are complemented by photographs of the author’s clay sculptures, which are not only compelling in their own right, but echo and emphasize the themes of the poems: “welcoming the possibility of loss, and of dying and of forgetting/and of being fierce with reality, gives protection. I yearn to give up expectations. Yet, I must remember not to forget to remember.”