Susan Moorhead

Carry Darkness, Carry Light Susan Moorhead

The poems in Susan Moorhead's Carry Darkness, Carry Light are lush with imagery and sound that serenade, mesmerize, and instruct. Here is an intimate map for a journey to discover the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary. Open to "Luna" and the act of moon-gazing crystallizes into the realization that "the hidden stars carry the stories / of the moon, there, and ourselves, here, and all / that is in between that cannot be explained / or known or answered." "Solace," in which the book's title can be found, captures the experience of losing yourself in Moorhead's poems: "And just like that you feel blessed. / That's how they come, these moments / of grace-".

- Linda Simone, author of The River Will Save Us

The poems in Susan Moorhead's Carry Darkness, Carry Light, are eloquent illustrations of a life that embraces the natural world. Indeed, the poet's door is always open to trees and leaves, and creatures. In "The Midnight Migration," she shows us how the trees "would shake /off their inhabitants, a flutter of birds and squirrels, / and bend their way through the open back door." On a walk in the woods, she finds a "Blue Willow" shard: "... Here was once a fine view of the sea./ Here was once somebody looking." Susan Moorhead is a poet who sees and generously shares her sight with the reader.

- Bertha Rogers, author of Wild, Again

In Carry Darkness, Carry Light by Susan Moorhead, we begin on a twilight street in search of the moon. And we find it, find many moons and many reasons to go looking for the moon, in this gorgeous, thoughtful book of poetry. Ms. Moorhead writes her unfolding poems lovingly, packed the way a life is, in layers of memory and now. In language that feels both good on our tongues and released to the air, she writes about things lost and things found with a grace that makes you too feel lost and found in the poems. Like the small sparrow in the poem, "Shift," you will remember the feathery feelings, the way your heart beats, reading each of these poems.

- Julia Klatt Singer, author of Elemental, poems written to the periodic table