GLGiles    PROFILE   GALLERY   BLOGS   GUESTBOOK   FRIENDS   FAVORITES   GIFTS   Your Ad Here 06 Feb 2008, 9:26 pm / Full of life “Healing Journey” G.L. Giles’s Review of Obsidian’s The Darker Side Of Light(available for purchase at www.barnesandnoble.com)  I love both the lyrical wordsmithing and stark wielding of truly helpful information that The Darker Side of Light exposes.  Though Obsidian admittedly struggled with depression and drug addiction, this book is also for those who haven't, for everyone must face their demons in the darker regions to allow the light to shine its very brightest. If one allows fear to stop one on their journey into the dark, then one will feel only stagnation and quiet desperation later.  Perhaps Obsidian expresses this best in the lines from 'Spirit's Song of Flight,' for she says:        Flight into night/      Into light./      Into sacred sight/        A caged bird does shatter her wings/        I found that I was holding my breath reading most of 'The Dark Places' 'the first section after the PROLOGUE' as I felt I was tugged under dangerous waters for the journey to the underworld.  The place where demons dance, and madness and the sublime marry.  I'd been there myself, so I could remember and relate:''  Obsidian's rendering made it more bearable as she throws the Reader an oxygen tank of sorts in the form of beautifully wrought words as she breathes the madness through one quickly before it has time to settle in the brain.    I was happy to reemerge on the surface again with 'In the Dawn.'  As, indeed, Obsidian too, somewhat ironically, emerges with more depth as a writer now, through experience and understanding, in this second section:  she's no longer a craftsman; she's now an artist who can bring to light some of the dark sublime.  This idea is presented in the third poem of the 'In the Dawn' section entitled 'SEA FOAM.'  Even the title shows the cleansing connotations of a past life discarded. However, it's not until the final section entitled 'In the Garden' that spontaneous joy is seen, erupting and abounding, truly unfettered by any vestiges of depression.  I loved the play on words in 'IN THE MIDNIGHT GARDEN' with lines like 'almost thyme for Moonflower to wake up' and 'the Queen scent them away.'  What a wonder-full journey to be taken on.   G.L. Giles, Author of V3 and V2:B4