After-Glow

After-Glow collects verse from Susan Coolidge, the pen name of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, whose poems carry the quiet luminescence of their title. These are poems written in the space between daylight and darkness, where the world softens and memory rises like heat from summer stones. Coolidge, who tended wounded soldiers during America's Civil War, understood that some lights do not vanish so much as transform into something else: a warm afterimage, a lingering glow that refuses complete disappearance. The collection moves through evenings and endings, through the particular melancholy and beauty of things in their last brilliant phase before night falls. There is no programmatic grief here, no heavy-handed mourning, but rather a steady, compassionate attention to what remains when the central fire has burned down. These poems speak to anyone who has watched a day end, who has held a memory close because it is all that is left of something precious, who has found grace not in the blaze but in what comes after it.