Still Water Carving Light

How does the awareness of death shape the ways we live? What language brings us deep into questions we can never resolve? Elegies open us, challenge us, sometimes restore us. In these elegiac poems, Peggy Shumaker honors those gone before us, those nearly done, and the unending life we pass on. With compassionate insight, Shumaker reminds us that while grief endures, it can be embraced, allowing for profound growth and deeper understanding.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“In the limpid poems of Still Water Carving Light Peggy Shumaker offers, again and again, tender, bravery in response to grief–the sickness of a beloved, the loss of dear friends.  She demonstrates how to care and mend for the self, the earth, and community, all “more beautiful / for having been broken” as she writes in “Kintsukuori: Each Day.”  A book of solace and, ultimately, hope: “broken as asphalt, // mended/ as water/ mends, then mends again,” Still Water Carving Light shows the reader how to move through life with love.  What sings forward as uniquely necessary is Peggy’s affirmation of relationships determined not by blood, but by choice, how women can mother without ever having borne children, how such care includes the beings around us and the land itself; Alaska and Arizona, in particular, are alive in these poems. Ultimately, what Peggy Shumaker gives us is evidence of the persistence and enduring nature of care—we see it in the hand’s mark on ancient sculpture, in the tender rituals of burial past and present, and in the memories within these poems.” 
—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry

“Peggy Shumaker’s poems find the life inside the life of loss, how it works, how it feels. How loss carves furrows in us and leaves us the beauty of carved things. The poems in this collection follow the inevitable trajectory of the beloved’s life, and of the lives of friends, and the love that outlasts it. They touch softly on grief’s tender spots. What I mean by that is my own personal sadnesses feel nurtured by the care in the lines. Each poem is a love song, a lullaby, and a dance.”
—Fleda Brown, author of Flying Through a Hole in the Storm

“Is it possible to eulogize the living as well as the dead? To mourn with praise “every cell of us, healthy or rogue” and every season that arrives, even the “season of general anesthetic”? Each page of Peggy Shumaker’s still water carving light answers yes. Yes, it is possible—“for this moment.” Yes, we can count “what we’ve made / of our dwindling lives / glorious.” Everyone and everything these poems attend to—her beloved Joe in his last months, friends and family members still alive in her memory, the named and unnamed thousands who came before her, even the Gila monster, that “gentle venomous friend” of her desert childhood—bears the imprint of Shumaker’s expansive, generous touch.”
—Rebecca McClanahan, author of In the Key of New York City

“These poems are so tender and sad and at the same time exultant and full of celebration. Once again, Peggy Shumaker has written a book full of life. All of life. From mountain to ocean, from deep breath to death. I smile and I cry from page to page of still water carving light. What treasure.”
—Camille Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden