Lucid Lightning: Poems and Prose by Victor Peñaranda

These are poems of (and as) luminous (as) silence—from a poet with the quiet heart of a pilgrim seeking “fallen petals” in mountain paths and streams of kindness and grace.
In these songs to sacred space, we find ourselves transported, hearing and marveling at that delicate voice of reverence whose prayers are answered with stillness, thus happiness.
—Krip Yuson

Raised in a land of such amazing fecundity of sea, earth, and sky, we should not want for anything. Yet the irony of our state is that we are always hungry, wanting more. We are forever poor, spending the hours of our days scrabbling for possessions that leave us even more poverty-stricken than even before. We are empty, not knowing where or what or how to fill that emptiness. Peñaranda takes us to an austere landscape filled with silence, the empty sky, a lone bird testing the pure air. He draws for us “a glacier charged with patience,” a place where all sensations are “ephemeral as a kiss.” Surely such a place is terra incognita to us who thrive daily in an orgy of sounds--words, music, media, innumerable kinsfolk, endless politics, the interminable wrangling within our spirit seeking meaning. This is our own geography—a land “troubled with nameless passions” and unnameable desires. Yet too, somewhere in this planet, away from our own teeming geography, there is a place where stillness rules, and serenity, harmony, the quenched desire. Peñaranda distills the sense of this place in the lucent lightnings of his poetry.

—Merlie M. Alunan

Jose Victor Peñaranda traveled to Bhutan, stayed and worked there for three years, and came home a changed person. So did I, after reading this collection. And so will you, dear reader. These poems, while inspired by actual journeys, have been invested with the poet’s transcendent vision which raised them to the level of spiritual journeys. Once you enter its world, you will want to stay there forever. There is not a single poem in Lucid Lightning that has a word or line or phrase or image that it can do without. Every word pulls its own weight; each poem invites, and generously rewards, every rereading. Get hold of this book. Don’t borrow someone else’s copy because you’ll never want to give it back. Don’t lend your copy or you’ll never get it back. Because you will want to read it again. And again.

—Susan Lara