About this item
Highlights
- Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE) Award for Best PoetryScudder H. Parker's poetry debut is a compilation of early experience, midlife discovery, and later-life thankfulness.
- Author(s): Scudder H Parker
- 134 Pages
- Poetry, Subjects & Themes
Description
About the Book
"Scudder Parker's poems allow us to see nature in a different light, and reflect on the meaning of life." -Governor Madeleine M. Kunin, author of Coming of Age, My Journey to the EightiesBook Synopsis
Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE) Award for Best Poetry
Scudder H. Parker's poetry debut is a compilation of early experience, midlife discovery, and later-life thankfulness. Safe as Lightning is pervaded by sadness about the current direction of our human experiment, and hope for what it might be for us to become respectful citizens living in a thriving and diverse world. A lifetime of observation, experience, and discovery of the amazing richness of the inner, human, and natural worlds; a total delight in the freedom and disciplines of language; a search for justice; and the practice of humility, have all inspired the poems contained within.
Review Quotes
"In one of the myriad lovely and cogent poems in Safe as Lightning, Scudder Parker writes:
I used to understand so many things.Now everything surprises me; anger shows up on my doorsteplike an orphan.Sadness is a thread of light I try to pick off the carpet.There is nothingI am qualified to rescue. I am learning to be patient.The verse is deft, the observation meticulous, as it is throughout this wonderful collection. To the emotions cataloged in this passage, I would add the whole range of human responses, for the poet encounters and limns each and all. And, though the final stanza above reflects his commendable humility, I take issue with it: Scudder Parker is a conservator: he 'rescues' so much in Safe as Lightning that the reader is challenged to take it all in. He or she must learn to be patient too." - Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate 2011-2015 and author of Here
"Anyone reading Scudder's poems knows how special it feels to be home in Vermont. One can read and re-read them and feel the comfort of home." - U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy
"Here is a voice accessible, yet elegant. There is no pretense, no agenda. Fully aware of past and future, of dangers, regrets and loss, these poems baptize the now, the exquisite temporary, with time and attention, and cause the reader to cherish their own life in fresh ways. In this decade of violence and division, these poems believe in life, in people doing what they can to care for the earth and each other. Listening to Scudder Parker's voice, full of tenderness, humor and humility, 'There is nothing/ I am qualified to rescue.' I felt rescued. Reading Safe as Lightning I felt hopeful, encouraged, and, for a time, safe." - Diane Swan, author of The Other Wish
"People who think of Scudder Parker as a former minister, Vermont legislator, and political activist who, "by the way," writes poetry will have to think again after reading his beautiful debut collection, Safe as Lightning. This is the work of a poet who deserves the name, a poet of broad range and deep sensibility. Among his many subjects and themes, one of the most prominent is that of gratitude, 'a different eye that opens- / unnerving in its great permissions.' It was certainly the emotion I felt after reading his book." - Garret Keizer, author of The World Pushes Back