“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 River is Blind

“Allison Grayhurst’s poetic prose is insightful, enwrapping, illuminating and brutally truthful. It probes the nature of the human spirit, relationships, spirituality and God. It is sung as the clearest song is sung within a cathedral by choir. It is whispered as faintly as a heartbroken goodbye. It is alive with the life of a thousand birds in flight within the first glint of morning sun. It is as solemn as the sad-sung ballad of a noble death. Read at your peril. You will never look at this world in quite the same way again. Your eye will instinctively search the sky for eagles and scan the dark earth for the slightest movement of smallest ant, your heart will reach for tall mountains, bathe in the most intimate of passions and in the grain and grit of our earth. Such is Allison Grayhurst. Such is her poetry. THE RIVER IS BLIND is a must-read. ” Eric M. Vogt, poet and author.

…

“Throughout (The River is Blind), she (Allison Grayhurst) employs reiterated tropes of swallowing and being consumed, spatial fullness and emptiness, shut- in, caverns, chasms, cavities; angels, archangels, blasphemy, psalms; satiation or starved. With a conceit of unrequited sex as “my desire”, nocturnal emissions, awakening in the morning, the poet lives at capacity, uninhibited, dancing,” Anne Burke, poet, regional representative for Alberta on the League of Canadian Poets’ Council, and chair of the Feminist Caucus.

“One of the best contemporary poetry books I have read and my favorite by Allison Grayhurst. I have this (The River is Blind) in paperback and find I come back to it often. I am very impressed that her poetry just oozes quality and in all ways gets my mind thinking. If you read poetry I highly recommend it, if you also write this is a great way to spend a couple of hours soaking in the quality and subject matters. The poems are spiritual and uplifting and I have never found any of her poems to be dull or depressing nor ever too hard to read. More life affirming each time I read one and I am always glad to have done so,” Bruce Ruston, poet, photographer, founding editor of The Poetry Jar.

“Her (Allison Grayhurst’s) poetry appears visceral, not for the faint of heart, and moves forward with a dynamism, with a frenetic pulse. If you seek the truth, the physical blood and bones, then, by all means, open the world into which we were all born,” Anne Burke, poet, regional representative for Alberta on the League of Canadian Poets’ Council, and chair of the Feminist Caucus, 2014.

Review of The River is Blind, by Allison Grayhurst

(Edge Unlimited Publishing,

2012) 99 pp. paper.

“This poetry is private, about women who can be “brutal”, “like a smile”, as well as “gloriously giving”, razor sharp, but “androgynously/beautiful”. In “What face?”, the embryo appears as if “you are neither/masculine or feminine.” Throughout, she employs reiterated tropes of swallowing and being consumed, spatial fullness and emptiness, shut-in, caverns, chasms, cavities; angels, archangels, blasphemy, psalms; satiation or starved. With a conceit of unrequited sex as “my desire”, nocturnal emissions, awakening in the morning, the poet lives at capacity, uninhibited, dancing. (“Deep Breath In”) She personifies a star as having “sweet blood” but plugged and unwholesome. In “this prevails”, she seeks a sponge to saturate. The extended conceit of death, using the metaphor of “a stream” which, paradoxically, the poet must “undress” in order “to know its cool wetness” (“Body of Water”) she implores the muse to rescue her from “this drowning”, to be released from sleeplessness. Her lover abandoned her, sick, with sensations of choking, near death, in a cave. She needs to soothe her despair, mid-day, as a serpent emerges. In “It starts”, “where water sinks or where water concentrates, “either way,[it] falls/but does not flow.” In “Claimed”, she wants more space in which to swim, “between clouds”. In “Box”, there are “tossing waters”, wet breath, a stream. In “Will you keep me”, drink me, stream through rainclouds. In ‘Seamless”, there are raincoats and rainy seasons, past is an outpouring. In “Desires traversed”, my liquid garden. In “I turn the corner and “wet river stones and floating. “Intimacy” is but “chilled water”. “Our Time” involves “melting waters together.” In “Emptied”, “a wave never crests.” In “I heard a poet say”, one sees God everywhere, even “in the swimming pool while treading water.” In ‘Yes”, the acts of weeping, showering, and dripping are linked. A squid’s tentacles are “pulled from pulsing water”. (“Our Light Cannot Always Burn Whole”) In “Matrimony” she explores the “wavelength”. In “I wait for you”, the words are “like lard”, but “I have sky-dived into a torrent wave for you”, now she is “drenched”. In “Surrogate Dharma”, she believes she could be transformed as a fish, “weaving with one full-body stroke.” She sets the scene of a phallic steeple which enters the sun’s skin, in order to liberate “a liquid radiation”, an act which is “brutish”, “pillaged”, “frozen”, emaciated”, “seeping”. (“Open Valve”) The same poem culminates with “overflowing, so overflowing” “drowns”, and “downpores”, “currents and currents”. In “Quagmire”, the known becomes “blindness”, a drooling city, with fluid boundaries. In “Changing Skins”, we learn that “lust is water”, but more than lust “is worth every star.” She confronts the afterbirth, with “a growing, encroaching wave”, while she rests on a raft, the fish are curiously contented swimmers, under seawater. (“Thirst”) In damp places she observes tree bark as living wood, but she insists on a new geography, with a private island (“I would not thirst”). In “Myth”, outpourings are “insatiable”. The body as garden, is capable of “rich waters”, “curvy undercurrents”, a mirage, drained of natural oils, and, ultimately, unsatisfying due to “this thin-stream garden hose (“Trickle”) The path to tranquility is paradoxically through mania: ” of our mutual exposure. I will speak in your ear and you will step into my voice like stepping into a river (“River”),” Anne Burk, poet, regional representative for Alberta on the League of Canadian Poets’ Council, and chair of the Feminist Caucus.