Step Lightly: Poems for the Journey
According to the introduction, the author began collecting poems she liked in a shoebox. She saved poems that gave her "the special kind of pleasure that good poetry gives when it celebrates the ordinary in an unordinary way."
The collection follows a dawn to dark theme, beginning with Emily
Dickinson's "Will There Really be a Morning?" and finishing with Dickinson's "Who is the East?", a poem about sunset. In between are poems about animals, people, and nature, most quite ordinary settings and situations but illuminated with the beauty that poetry can invoke. The poets include William Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Denise
Levertov, Lucille Clifton and Wallace Stevens. I was especially charmed by a poem by Pablo Neruda, "Ode to a Pair of Socks." Several of the poems are translations from other languages, too, which adds some multicultural flavor.
The fifty-six poems featured in Step Lightly are not necessarily easy
reading - I found myself rereading several of them, trying to figure out their meaning. I would recommend this collection for high school students.
