Shadow of the Living Brightness

Poem about unknowing and the uncertainty of in-between states

Shadow of the Living Brightness takes its title from Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s description of the ‘sensation of God’s presence.’ Béchard manages to make this and other ineffables effable in this collection of poems that offers multiple dimensions of knowing and feeling that are at once fugitive and palpable. How to limn the tension between stepping into and away from the world? What do we not see in our seeing? How to sound sound? The book explores, with the dazzling honesty only a slant approach can achieve: grief, withdrawal, hope, mental illness, suicide. This is a book about unknowing, about uncertainty and in-between states. At the same time, the aching beauty of things and the language that evokes them can fire up a sense of radical attention and connection. Here it’s the very fallibility of set identities and truths that invites our re-engagement with their wobbly splendour.