Summary

The first poem in the collection, “Let Light Shine Out of Darkness,” introduces us to the speaker and his basic existential dilemma. The title, with its imperative voicing and vaguely religious language, expresses this dilemma urgently, and in terms lightness and darkness: he lives in a body that does not have enough light in it. The speaker has been living in ignorance, in that he was previously unaware that he was alienated from his own body. After the speaker’s body throws him into an awareness of his self-alienation, he feels compelled to overcome this darkness through writing, although this goes against his instincts, which have been conditioned and “congested with images of mutilation” (13). The poem culminates in a dream-like sequence in which he finally sees light in his body, “not sun over the sand but a drip of soft blue on a...