Stairway to Heaven: Poems [Paperback]

A new collection from a poet who “writes with scrupulous and merciful passion about every kind of relatedness—family, place, politics, and wildlife” (W. S. Piero)

In her fifth book of poems,Stairway to Heaven, Alison Hawthorne Deming explores dimensions of grief and renewal after losing her brother and mother. Grounded in her communion with nature and place, she finds even in Death Valley, that most stark of landscapes, a spirit of inventiveness that animates the ground we walk on. From the cave art of Chauvet to the futuristic habitat of Biosphere 2, that inventiveness becomes consolation for losses in family and nature, a means to build again a sense of self and world in the face of devastating loss.Advance Praise forStairway to Heaven
 
“Deming’s sophisticated yet accessible work is an ecopoetic disquisition and aphoristic guidebook, but most saliently, it is an imagist gem that is urgent and masterly in its evocation of place, liminality, and waking dreams.”
–Publishers Weekly

“Voice as ‘shelter and invitation’ – this is exactly what Deming’s voice becomes inStairway to Heaven. Shelter from the madness threatening all natural gravities; invitation to wisdom and deeper knowing, woven of intricate knowledge and care. This is a book to climb with, again and again.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye
 
“Never was a book of elegies so suffused with life asStairway to Heaven--with life and with the painful joy that arrives in, as part of, an earthly body. Aptly, the book's title directs us at once toward the place we imagine awaits us after this life and to the actual sky in which we imagine it, even when we don't believe in any afterlife. What these poems compellingly argue, through their intense presence, is that what we find here, even as we feel ourselves leaving lc)