Through Sun-glinting Particles

Allegra Silberstein

Silberstein focuses her poems on those mysteries that populate our day to day lives, among them those strange spaces between people described as ‘friendship,’ ‘love,’ and ‘desire,’ which resist true expression in words. Instead, she turns to nature and its healing powers: “Let us sing aubades to  morning light, / to each new day, to each new start, to all / the wild birds that whisper hope in their flight./ Do not acquaint me with the dark of night.”

Allegra Silberstein was born in the middle of a blizzard on a farm in Wisconsin. Her Norwegian ancestors by-passed the flat prairie land and settled in the coulees and hills of the non-glaciated area near the Mississippi River. Her love of poetry began as a child when her mother recited poems as she worked. Silberstein has lived in California since 1963 but her growing years on the farm in Wisconsin brought a deep appreciation for the out-of-doors world that stays with her and sustains her.

She has over a hundred publications in journals such as Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, Iodine Poetry Journal, Poetry Now, Rattlesnake Review and others. Her work is included in anthologies like The Sacramento Anthology: 100 Poems; Gatherings: A Woman’s Place; and Where Do I Walk. She has two chapbooks: Acceptance, published by Small Poetry Press and In The Folds, published by Rattlesnake Review. In March of 2010 she was selected as the first Poet Laureate for the city of Davis, California.

A review of Through Sun-glinting Particles appeared in the May 2012 issue of the Midwest Book Review.

Writes poet and reviewer Hannah Stein,

Allegra Silberstein lets us glimpse riches in her touching new chapbook, Through Sun-Glinting Particles. This poet processes hard challenges, and through her celebratory response to nature and to the varied accretions life has presented over a lifetime, proposes challenges of her own.

Silberstein, for all the sensitivity she reveals to the sadness that accompanies the human condition, finds overflowing springs of light and life within her generous and courageous nature. This does not mean glossing over the buffets with which life, even at its most kindly, bruises human beings. What strikes a reader from the title onward is a sense of compromised light. The reader often must supply the absent reference to a darkness that streams unspoken through clouds, or to losses suggested by personal shadows only hinted at: “take time // feel the breath that fills me, / know it lets go . . . lets go.” Nor has her celebration of the world of nature made her impractical: “Hawks were made / to hunger and thirst like me, but I / won’t prepare a table for them.”

This poet’s readers will find shape in the shadows implied by her enigmatic title. The subtle and allusive cover photograph offers sunrays streaming from behind a wintry grove of tall, strikingly bare, tree trunks. Yet it is not even the allusion to what may be seen through its “particles” that kindles a reader’s curiosity, as much as the particles themselves. In the poem “Old Woman with Springtime Eyes” they are beautifully suggested: “your dustpan flashing / through sun-glinting particles / as if gathering stardust.” It is revelatory of this poet’s vision that “gathering stardust” can emerge from the pedestrian image of a dustpan. At its most joyous as well as when expressing regret or disappointment, it is this magnanimous and piquant point of view that informs Silberstein’s work.

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Excerpt

Notes from Aunt Lil

I’m feeling old and tired and lost
and think of days gone by and cry
about the young folks going by
without a thought of miseries cost
or how the apple trees will bloom
and lilacs come to scent the air
without shop windows for compare
to dress our wishes with aplomb.

I sit and rock and take my rest
remembering poems learned by heart.
Thing singing songs of long-gone days
consider how my hours are blest
by touch that’s kept in memory’s cart –
the votive and migrant strays.