Where Divinity Begins
Selected Poems
Where Divinity Begins is clearly poetry written out of necessity. There is nothing trivial here, nothing settled easily. Deborah DeNicola has an uncanny instinct to locate her poems at the heart of our human commerce so that the questions asked are always the big questions, and the truths revealed always are truths that can only be discovered through brave acts of the imagination. Her poems wear these gestures in the form of good, clear writing and sensuous detail.
—Bruce Weigl
Where Divinity Begins is stunning— sexy, jazzy, somber and steeply Gregorian by turns. The poems view the world through an eye that magnifies and transforms like a prism. The voice blooms deep within a woman’s psyche, and speaks of the human soul, its myths, arts, passions and ordinary objects. But most of all the poems sing, and music here becomes thought, prayer, the food that sustains us, carries us on our journeys.
—Betsy Sholl
This book struggles with issues of isolation, lost love and friendships, desire, hope— in terms that include classical and biblical allusions, painting, history— what we might expect, yes— but also counterpointed against tanning salons, beached whales and a variety of everyday events, for this is a poetry where the everyday is informed by those larger issues, and the larger issues given substance by the everyday. Where Divinity Begins explores the inner life and finds a place where courage, vision and music—the poet’s voice—become essential and lifesaving.
—Richard Jackson