Overview

The poems in Claiming Light and Darkness don't try to paint pictures of nature, even when they describe surprising glimpses of it in ordinary places. They simply discover nature as they reach into the depth of darkness and light that together are essential for life. In this small collection each hour and season respond to a unique angle of the sun. Every hour of day and night offers a particular light and darkness, always with its own beauty, its own certain gift.

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"If poets celebrate the world they inhabit, Sr. Sally Witt finds stark beauty in a rust-belt neighborhood of ""snow-bent daffodils"" next to long-dark, dismantled steel mills. Row houses ""huddle closer"" in winter ""than in lighter seasons."" Trees in the yards of ""vacant, boarded, vandalized"" houses still blossom in the spring, ""defiant."" Like Saint Francis, Sr. Sally addresses the sun, light, darkness, and the four seasons as ""dear"" friends. The chapbook is aptly named. The poet claims Light and Darkness. She understands that from the beginning of creation, light was called out of darkness. ""Doesn't your heart leap,"" she asks, ""at what the unexpected winter light reveals, / at beauty deeper than death or any darkness!"" Even in the short, cold days of winter, light gleams through maple leaves and pine needles, ""filled with sun."" And the poet reminds us that this greenery finally ""come[s] to understand its message: Do not fear. / Remember, you are drenched / Indelibly in love. As are we all.-Sr. Rita M. Yeasted, SFCC, Distinguished Professor of English Emerita, La Roche University . In these verses, delicate and elegant, love animates sun and blossom, triumphing even when abandoned houses fall into decay and steel mills rust. Witt's vision is quiet and holy, infused with beauty and grace which endure.-Jill Pel�ez Baumgaertner, Poetry Editor, The Christian Century . These poems follow the light-from morning to evening, from winter to spring and round again, like fine paintings or a walk with a friend. They are in place and of place, as Sally Witt considers the quality and life of sunbeams traveling 92 million miles, and of the things the light exposes, then hides, such as trees and steel mills and kitchen interiors. Linked to religious life and reflective of Native American theology, this poet lives in, and ushers us into, the world of all living beings, and the variety of seeing and experiencing them. Here is the thing itself, living moments bathed in light. -Susan Sink, poet, author of The Way of All the Earth, Habits, and H is for Harry"

Author Information

Sally Witt, a historian, is the author of: Sisters of the North Country, The History of the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Diocese of Ogdensburg, Watertown, NY; A Hidden Spirit: The History of the Holy Spirit Sisters of the Diocese of Pittsburgh; and Beyond the Frontier: The History of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Concordia, KS. She is a Sister of St. Joseph of Baden, PA, and has taught at Carlow and La Roche Colleges (now Universities) in Pittsburgh. She has also taught and conducted oral history projects in several towns and neighborhoods of western Pennsylvania. Her poems have appeared in: U.S. Catholic, The Christian Century, Spirituality, Soul by Southwest, Delta Epsilon Sigma Journal, The Loyalhanna Review, and other publications.

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