And Now the Story Lives Inside You

by Elizabeth Reninger

"My poems most often have their origin in the delight and mystery and wisdom I find within the natural world...and how these processes these movements of the elements, can be mirrors to the sort of transformation described by the world's great mystical traditions. It is through poetry that I explore the playful relationship between mind and body and spirit and world."

70 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Elizabeth Reninger is a poet and freelance writer, currently living in Boulder, Colorado. Her first full-length collection of poems - And Now The Story Lives Inside You - was published in 2005. Elizabeth is also a longtime student of yoga (in its Buddhist, Taoist & Hindu forms) and maintains a private energy-arts healing practice.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 5 out of 5]

When time permits, I invite you to spend an eternity walking among the finely polished syllables of the sixty-one poems in Elizabeth Reninger’s And Now The Story Lives Inside You.

“North Boulder Creek,” “Butterfly,” “Sand Castles,” “Winter Birch & Stars” and the other gems in this remarkable debut collection bring to the page a great economy of language, laser-crisp and metaphorical, reminiscent of traditional Chinese and Japanese poetry—yet with a clear, new voice.

Here we see the realism of the natural world combined with the deeper mysteries that unfold before the eyes of an observer with an eagle’s eyes. Reninger sees the wild things and wild places with great accuracy, reminiscent of the clarity Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) brings to her books—yet with a knowing that breaks down the boundaries between ourselves and the world around us.

Every careful brush stroke in the smooth-flowing calligraphy of Reninger’s lines calls forth old secrets, old mysteries, old wisdom—the energies behind the manifestations of rocks and birds and clouds—that transform in our reading of them into our own evolving stories.

You will, with certainty, mature with the “young grasses coming up like dreams from the Earth’s revolving sleep,” move ahead as your “body turns where your breath takes it,” and attune yourself to the secrets of meadow and forest as you learn “how to walk as though caressing the Earth.”

I invite you, when time permits, to set aside your map and compass, and follow your intuition down the pathways of Reninger’s words to catch the dancing light, to glimpse spirit’s “fiercely elegant dash from mystery into the manifest,” and to find your own reflection in nature’s all-seeing mirror.