Mysterious Light; Poems, Colorful and Transparent

Joyce's painting called "Bones of Zion" graces the cover of Mysterious Light. Her poems radiate beauty across the pages in "eddies of lemon and gold." "An aurora borealis shimmers" inside her past. A worldliness that began in childhood, living above a funeral parlor where "vacant mouths and cobwebbed hair," leapt from her imagination at night. Joyce enters into "a yellow flame of mystery," where the alchemy of her word paintings is so powerful as to actually absorb grief and transform it into a lush beauty.
-Lynne Barnes, poet

Delving beneath the surface of things, Joyce Uhlir's poems explore and shed light on a multi-dimensional world of nature where sight, sound, feelings, smell and taste mix - like paint on a pallet - to the delight of body and soul. Jasmine plays at the tip of my nose./ Cranberries splash round/ the playfulness of my tongue," she writes. The light in her poems can also thread its way into "the black fabric of night" as "Distant stones in a dark universe/ blink..." and as stars arrive "in the yawn of evening." Sensuous and spiritual at the same time, this light often seems like x-ray vision, making the opaque transparent and beautiful. Fortunately for us, she has shared her word paintings here, poems filled with "mysterious light."