Sheila Packa

Echo & Lightning Sheila Packa

Echo & Lightning, by Duluth Poet Laureate Sheila Packa, uses the metaphor of bird migration and myth to examine ways we relinquish the self. "So many poems in Echo and Lightning reveal what has to be given away in order to be filled with something greater - a more intense spiritual awareness, a fuller connection with the landscape, a more generous and all-encompassing love. I often felt breathless reading these poems, utterly willing to step off firm ground and take to the air with Packa's journeying geese and swans, but reminded by the poet of what must be left behind in order to make such an exhilarating ascension - 'if you make the sky your home/ - it isn't easy, you can't bring those things'. The risk of transformation is reflected in the northern landscape Packa portrays with intimate, even mystical knowledge, a landscape where water and weather and existence is always both beauty and sacrifice. Echo and Lightning transforms us into something freer, wilder, more given to loving, while reminding us that to fly is to risk leaving the old behind, to become 'not given to possessing/ but unpossessing.' " says Kirsten Dierking. author of Northern Oracle