Motes at Play in the Halls of Light

In Devon Balwit’s Motes at Play in the Halls of Light, we are thrust into a world with “the colors screaming all around.” The works of visual and musical artists—Miró, Kline, the cave painters of Lascaux, Scarletti and Dix—constrict the reader and the writer, “demanding a word,” and we are left breathless. Balwit’s steely and mature gaze takes these poems beyond the ekphrastic; they fall under the poet’s sway, become part of her universe, where “the wordsmith will rule.” Motes at Play in the Halls of Light luxuriates in its beauty and its inevitable pain.“Everyday, / compelled by red-hot, I toy with immolation.” Devon Balwit claims her own stars, and we read in “wonderment and envy.”

—Jennifer Martelli, author of The Uncanny Valley and After Bird

As the editor of The Ekphrastic Review, I read many fine poets inspired by art. Devon's special gifts are rare, even among the most talented. These poems are stuffed with the juiciest, most tantalizing words, spun effortlessly into gold. They maintain emotional intensity and impact in poem after poem, boldly asking questions we haven't dared. Her uncanny ability to conjure the reader's own memories and secret thoughts renders the reader nearly naked. The surprises of language alone make for compulsive reading and a million eureka moments, but Devon's work also achieves the impossible- true originality, that most elusive and scarce glimmer that any writer would cut off her right hand for. Her poems illuminate the arteries, bones and blood of art, showing you that art is a living thing far beyond its surface. Absolutely stunning.

—Lorette Luzajic, artist, founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review

I am astonished by the depth and breadth of Devon Balwit’s first full-length poetry collection, Motes at Play in the Halls of Light. I am reminded of the first lines in Adam Zagajewski’s poem “A River,” “Poems from poems, songs / from songs, paintings from paintings, / always this friendly impregnation…” I discovered Balwit’s work in internet journals and was taken by her ability to respond to current events, visual arts, music, and poetry itself. But, her work is more inquiry than response—inquiry into the nature of art and artist, inquiry into the essence of the self. Witness these lines from “What Floats,” “Some days, I fish out / the dead, others, /whatever floats / from watery darkness, wrung from the world / by its turning.”

—Donna Hilbert, author of Gravity: New and Selected Poems

Devon Balwit writes in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry), and Risk Being/Complicated (self-publishedwith the Canadian artist Lorette Luzajic). Her individual poems can be found on-line, in print, and on her FB page.