Honeyed Light: Poems

Amidst the noise and chaos of today’s world, Emily Blair Stribling’s poems quietly enter the heart and fill us with wonder and gratitude at being alive. Stribling’s poems are rich meditations on a world in which we belong to each other. Her poems are steeped in luminous memories of home, place, and beloveds. Be it her children or bears or birds or ocean or trees, she writes out of her conviction that we are all connected, all a part of the wild nature of this miraculous world. Her poems speak to what remains over time, showing us a way forward, always, always towards the light.

Tell me, have you yearned to wander into a pocket of joy and linger awhile?

Have you longed for so much light you could swim in it?

Or to find a way to let wonder take over the wheel of your life?

Look no further: this lovely and loving collection of Emily Blair Stribling’s poetry will transport you into the poet’s world on a journey of loss, restoration, of dreams and stars and grandchildren and contentment and sorrow. You will drift with her for a salt-soaked afternoon and glory in the small tokens of wonder she finds everywhere.

Filled with light and music, these poems both model and invite loving attentiveness to the rich holiness of ordinary life-the sights and smells and memories of rooted home landscapes, vibrant presences of animals and growing things, and the settled bonds of family and friendship, renewed across generations.

Emily Stribling’s new book of poems, Honeyed Light, is alive with music as well as words. There’s the sweet, ever-flowing rhythm of the gorgeous word choices, the perfect phrases, and the penetrating metaphors and similes that tumble out endlessly. But then there’s the deeper, hidden rhythms that only emerge when you’ve read the whole book and let it soak in for a while. These are the slower rhythms of light, darkness, the seasons, love, and loss. And the slowest, most poignant rhythm of them all is, of course, the passing pulse of one’s own life. Stribling doesn’t shy away from any of the music of her life in this exquisite and profound collection. The rhythm of life is in it. Read it, deep and long. When you really let it seep in, your heart will hear it and dance.