One Glittering Wing

By Joan Myles

Praised for it stunning images and lilting language, One Glittering Wing is a collection of playful, prayerful, mournful, powerful poems which deeply speak its author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joan Myles
• Release date: Mar 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005959036

Joan Myles

Joan Myles has always been a child of Wonder as well as a spiritual seeker. When she lost her sight at the age of 12, these qualities and writing poetry saved her from despair.Joan earned a B.A. in Education, a Master’s in Jewish Studies. She married, raised four lively children, worked as a Rehabilitation Teacher, and taught Hebrew and Judaics for over 15 years.Her first book of poetry, One With Willows, vividly expresses Joan’s child-like joy. She considers her poems to be a kind of footpath for readers, an opening into that place of delight, an invitation to awaken childlike wonder for themselves.Joan’s words also reveal the invisible link between one human being and another, between humans and Nature, between the physical realm and the Spiritual. The idea of the Oneness of Creation flows through her work, the understanding of living in the world as a journey of discovery, of stepping into and between the various layers and levels of existence. Joan’s latest collection, One Glittering Wing, represents this kind of journey, specifically through her year long passage from the deep pain of her mother’s death toward reconciliation with Life.Joan currently lives in Oregon with her best friend, who also happens to be her husband.You can contact her at http://www.jewniquelymyself.com

Book preview

Foreword

Lilting language shapes the poems in One Glittering Wing by Joan Myles. Phrases such as … leafy and winged things / named reclusive / named forgetful and forgotten … from her piece, Dancing with Emily Dickinson, stay in my mind.

Throughout the book, word-pictures of sensory experience and metaphors reveal meaning. Poetic forms fit her themes of nature, loss, spirituality, and the world’s repair. Each poem tells its tale indirectly, letting the reader leap to understanding. We not only read the pieces—we participate in them. For example, the poet’s vivid storytelling in Walls generates empathy and finally, our indignation.

Overall, the pace of the collection is leisurely, with Joan’s work rising off the page slowly enough for us to take everything in. Words echo in multiple pieces, create flow.

Rhythm engages us. Only at the conclusion of Seeing, a poem that connects the earthbound with the ineffable, did I fully exhale. The rhythm of the two-line stanzas had captured not only my attention but also, my breath. And, rhythm weaves together the lyrical Kaddish: the sea eases itself and all it brings / forward then back … this prayer / fashioned and lived by our sages / a talisman and a hope / this prayer has a rhythm / its pulse urges me forward and back.

Spirituality is a thread in the