MacKinney, Texas May 21, 2023 (Issuewire.com) - Mundus Artium Press announces the publication of STEPS, a poem cycle crafted by acclaimed writer Angela De Leo in tribute to the trials and blessings of human experience. When a painful fall left the beloved Italian author unable to move by more than small steps at a time, she responded with a practice of visionary writing, resulting in a work of healing and renewal -- a portrait of an irrepressibly resilient spirit.
Through the touchstone of carefully observing how the passing seasons correspond with her todays and yesterdays, De Leo exercises an ecstatic slowness that reanchors her in the here and now, as well as in all the happiest realities of her journey through life and love. The collection's poems teach us, as she puts it, "different ways of going through the seasons, which move through us as we ourselves change our way of moving..."
As De Leo contemplates her life's sum of seasons and seasonality itself, she reaffirms her love of life and capacity for joy. She cherishes her past, while also finding solidarity with younger generations, "who make each new dawn a leaf from Heaven, in which our every Breath becomes Soul."
In our era of navigating rushed lives, readers will identify with De Leo's quest to "drink, in sunfilled cups, the fullness of existence: the liqueur of days of honey..." The suffering imprinted in STEPS is eclipsed by its distillation of sweetness, which the poet's alchemy of words allows us to share.
STEPS' complete title, STEPS of water wind snow and grass, relates to an understanding of the seasons that shapes the book's four-part structure.
The book's cycle opens with summer, which the author, a native of coastal Bari in Italy's south, associates with water, birth and maturation -- from the sandcastles of childhood to the seaside romance of youth. De Leo still views the sea with love and trust, despite life's storms.
Next come transitional autumn's steps through wind, through changing colors and falling leaves and the melancholy of impermanence and uncertainty. Here, too, De Leo finds a cause for celebration in nature's and life's bountiful harvests.
Winter, the season of steps through snow, achingly mirrors the poet's losses and regrets. Yet De Leo looks to the birds and flowers that withstand the cold, and to the warmth and glory of holidays and human kindness.
The poet's spring steps through grass inspire her to hope for an eternal rebirth, prepared for by the whole contrasting cycle of light and darkness. What's more, De Leo writes, "the soul's music tells me / of a fifth season in a meadow / always embroidered / with emeralds and forget-me-nots..."
Angela De Leo's new contemporary classic STEPS, released concurrently in the original Italian in the writer's home country, represents the English-language debut of an author who for six decades has established a stellar reputation through her publications of short stories, poetry collections, novels and essays on literature. STEPS' minimalistic poems subtly but surely lead to sublimity, suddenly taking flight, shifting their attention from the domestic to the cosmic as they weave from line to heartfelt line. Lyrically diaristic, a testament to the deep time in each moment, STEPS can help us move through our lives' seasons to our own revelations of solace.
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