“When I read Allison Grayhurst’s poetry, I am compelled by the intensity and strength of her spirituality. Her personal experience of God drives her poetry. With honesty and vulnerability, she fleshes out the profound mystery of knowing at once both the beauty and terror of God’s love, both freedom and obedience, deep joy and sorrow, both being deeply rooted in but also apart from the world, and lastly, both life and death. Her poems undulate through these paradoxes with much feeling and often leave me breathless, shaken. Allison Grayhurst’s poems are both beautiful and difficult to behold,” Anna Mark, poet and teacher.

“A river is in Allison Grayhurst’s poems. Sometimes it rages over boulders hidden beneath rapids. Sometimes it is as calm and placid as a summer day reflecting skies so blue they are as unusual as a Stellar Jay’s wings. Sometimes it is as unpredictable as the rhythm of clouds gathering before a storm. Made up of words, emotions, thoughts, thoughts crystallized into ideas, this river, like most rivers, is unforgettable. One poem cascades after another into a flood of poetry. As in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Allison Grayhurst’s work can be dense with meanings hidden beneath the flowing surface of words. The emotions in her poems sear with the power of Sylvia Plath. One layer reflects light over another layer of thought and emotion that leads to yet another layer. This is as serious a poet as is writing poetry today. For those adventurous enough to venture into a river wild, deep, calm, beautiful, shadowed, light, filled with moods and emotions of both an inner and the earth’s landscape, then this is a journey worth taking. It leads to experiences that have the texture and substance of life,” Thomas Davis, poet, educator, scholar, playwright, and novelist.

Reviews of The Many Lights of Eden

“When I started to read Allison Grayhurst’s collection of poetry entitled ‘The Many Lights of Eden’, I was expecting it to contain verses of the highest quality. I was expecting it to be a journey through spirituality. I was expecting this book to speak of God. I was not disappointed.
“Yes, it is a journey: a journey of the heart through youth, anguish, struggle, spiritual awakening, grief, death, love, loss, guilt, struggle, despair, hope, surrender, God, sensuality, imperfection, motherhood, aging, the vanquishing of the devil, indeed, many devils, the inevitable fall from perfection and the casting off of old wineskins for a new one.
“Perhaps speaking of this book as a chronicle of spiritual maturing would be more accurate, the realization that there is spirituality within imperfection and that handmade temples cannot hope to compete with the spiritual temples within each of us. By the end of the collection there is a spiritual ascension, a victory over demons of the past now slayed. There is height in Love and Forgiveness in guilt. There is an embracing of the chaos of life and a positive hope for the future. And, I believe, the realization that God is higher than chaos and the Creator is more permanent than perfection.
“This journey touched me. It is a journey that every person makes at sometime in their life. And this trail we trod does not end. There is beauty in the trail and its many aspects just as there is beauty from every vantage point of the admirer of a diamond.
“‘The Many Lights of Eden’ is a diamond. It is a beautiful collection of insights and I appreciate the many nuances of meaning to Allison Grayhurst’s poetry. Her thoughts and writings are a deep well. Drink from it, for the water is clear and crisp. This collection is a MUST-READ,” Eric M. Vogt, author of Letters to Lara and Paths and Pools to Ponder.

“I have been slow at responding to reviews for Allison Grayhurst due to summer’s busy days, however she brings life to each poem, heart to the images and everyone should have a collection of Grayhurst Poetry,” Ann Johnson-Murphree, poet.