Shadow Crossing

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

Lea Harper is a songwriter and performer as well as a poet. Her second
collection, which follows her LaPointe Prize-winning book All That Saves
Us, is organized into three parts. The first, The Path of No Return,”
addresses a favorite theme of Harper’s—the way in which experience
shapes one’s temperament. The strong opening poem expresses this
theme: “we are accidents of change / sightless to circumstance /
strangers in apogee” bound to the world by longing, toppled “like
hollow trees taken by the wind.”

The second section, “Blood of the Earth,” recounts personal and
tribal battles, recalling Oka, Palestine, and Central America. Here
“Peace” is personified as “profound loneliness,” and “Trust”
is “her companion / nestled in your shoulder / like a sleeping gun.”


Redolent with multiethnic imagery—“a glittering ghost dance,” the
kerosene circle,” “green bay / vendors,” and “Clan
mothers”—Harper’s poems work through the dark night of the soul on
many levels. “Shadow Crossing” is “the crossroads / where
destinies intersect—/ the darkness before ascension.” There is also
humor in poems, with lines like “Even the clouds fell for you /
thunderstruck,” and hope for ascension at “Dreamers Rock,” where
one might “hear the true music of our names / wed stars to our
reflections.”

Harper sees both bud and thorn in life, and is able to integrate the
individual and the community with her cosmic and (wo)man-made symbolism;
these coalesce in the final section, “True Colours.” Here she speaks
of balancing angels on her “turntable,” and reasons like a Taoist
sage. Her daughter asks questions about “mixed” blood and she
explains the harmonizing “In the chalice of the heart.”

This is an appealing book, full of originality and excitement. Under
Harper’s sun (which “incubates” out of an egg stone) there are
definitely new ways of dislocating the cliché, commingling the
elements, and co-creating the universe.