The Orchard Street Press is pleased to announce the release of Stumbling Into Grace, the exceptional new poetry collection by Deborah Bachels Schmidt of El Sobrante, CA.
James P. Roberts, author of One Hundred Breaths and Famous Wisconsin Authors, notes that Stumbling Into Grace “presents a world where apricot trees bear the fruit of memories, gardens grow muses, painted toy horses prance, and music is the thread that holds them all together. Like Orpheus, Schmidt’s poems are both lyrical and dynamic. We find ourselves carried along their airy currents like burning sky lanterns, rising toward ‘radiance and hope.’”
Jack Foley, poet and host of KPFA’s Cover to Cover, observes: “Music, nature, and family animate Deborah Bachels Schmidt’s lifelong quest ‘to live despite mortal illness/in beauty and symmetry.’ As a very young child, Bachels Schmidt’s experience of Casals playing Bach drew her ‘entirely within/a golden cone of light and sound.’ The adult poet seeks to recreate that experience in every poem in this collection, in which each utterance delivers an ‘hour of grace.’ ‘We are not afraid of beauty.’”
Diane Frank, author of While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and selected Poems, comments: “In these pandemic times, the world needs poems that provide vision, joy, and grace. Stumbling Into Grace provides this kind of elixir. From the first poem through the narrative arc of her book, we receive a mythology of our times, full of ancient wisdom. In her jewel-like poems we feel a child’s amazement as Pablo Casals plays the Bach Cello Suites. As the poet reveals the ‘faint, dark, forest incense of her heart,’ her book is a ‘prayer for this beautiful world.’”
Stumbling Into Grace is available, both online and via mail, for $12 from:
The Orchard Street Press
P.O. Box 280
Gates Mills, Ohio 44040
Orchard This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Orchpress.com (website)
330-264-7733