Bruce LeRoy Jones has crafted a luminous and passionate poetry collection. Some Way Back guides us through a via negativa experience of the death of his beloved – his wife Lesa. His poetics invites the reader into a profound, sensory and psychological engagement with his loss, grief and suffering into the redemptive power of eternal love.
Bruce has a poet’s eye for signs of her absence, which are embodied in words, sound and image. We are encouraged to see her presence in circles, petals and the moon, and feel her presence on the “sun’s breeze”, in a “Starry light”, and in prosaic memories of a shared glass of wine and meal of clam chowder soup.
The search for meaning of her passing is a progression from a desire for connection to her wholeness despite death’s separation and dismemberment, articulated in Creation through the Rubedo phase of alchemical transformation wherein her Eternal Being becomes transparent through self-revelation.
The Mandorla is now the still point having transfigured from an urn into a Mandela consisting of four circles. This image embraces and reunites them in his soul image of her, which the poet delivers as a tangible reality for the reader, as well as into the infinity and singularity of the universe.
Bruce LeRoy Jones. http://books.fourcircles.org
Frances Roberts Reilly 