The Evening and the Light | Barbara Varanka

In The Evening and the Light, Barbara Varanka weaves together wonder, love and loss through rich and intimate imagery. Her embrace of nature melds truth with the fanciful — “I am confetti, alive and wild,/ unfurling the neighborhood,/ waking the dogs.” She stitches a through-line of family, celebrates heritage and hopes in crisp yet poignant detail. “Like a nesting doll/ she holds the future, outliving us all.” The achingly beautiful title poem walks us through grief and loss. “I wonder/ where she is and why/ she can’t be here,/ what she’s so busy doing.” The reader will want to linger and savor this fine collection.    -Susan Carman, poet and past poetry editor of Kansas City Voices   In The Evening and the Light, Barbara Varanka channels H.D.’s lyric attention to the natural world, inviting the reader to revel in the pleasure of earth’s garden, urging, “The lilacs get you drunk at the gate.” Yet, like the wild strawberry, a plant that appears in several poems, the root structure of t