The Path of Loneliness explores separateness and the many facets of love, desire, grief and loss that we experience during our life journey. Although we walk with others, some closely, some casually, ultimately, we all walk alone. Love makes the path less lonely and comes in many forms, real and surreal, requited and unrequited ghostly and mysterious. Though lovers walk love’s pathway together, there is always a small loneliness nestled inside each heart and soul that remains separate. This book opens up the secret world of emotion and spirit sequestered inside us, hidden to our outer selves. The book coaxes the reader to delve into those hidden areas and revisit old secrets, some forgotten and some remembered, allowing us to come away with a truer knowledge of our place in life as we walk our own “Path of Loneliness.”
”Yet again, Candice James has produced a beautiful and heartwarming collection of poetry. A lovely set of poems on landscape, love, and loneliness that gently unfold to leave the reader moved, transported, and inspired. Each line is a soaring melody and when the lines are combined into a powerful whole you have your very own complete symphony.”
— Alan Hill, Poet Laureate, New Westminster, BC, and author of We Came from Water and Narrow Road to the Far West
”Candice James is a poet of versatility and expansion. In this collection, The Path of Loneliness, she takes the reader on a journey of the heart. My favourite poem, “Again and Again,” speaks of the infinite and the ordinary, in a way that uses cadence to reinforce the impossible. Candice’s own strong musical background is the golden thread these poems are attached to. Beautiful language and sparkling imagery make The Path of Loneliness relevant and vital.”
—Jude Neal, author of Impromptu and Splendid in its Silence
”Of loneliness much has been said. More reflections emerge as we navigate the isolating, unembracing times of covid-19. But here, Candice James paints the purple of being lonely in love. With another brush, the dusty lonely of loss. With another, the shadows of colonized star. All this, on an empty canvas of loneliness as a choice to be made and remade.”
—Salimah Valiani, author of Land of the Sky and Cradles
”In these poems, Candice James confronts a world of disappointment, loss and sadness when the scintillating promise of romantic love dies. In The Path of Loneliness the journey is one marked by the ghosts of past loves, of regret and unspoken, un-lived intentions. Yet, the way travelled is one of persistence of the soul and spirit to rise through all the elements: air, fire, water, dust to come through. The poet’s destination is a place of art, music and most of all, poetry. In the poem “Poets’ Dance,” James invites us in, “… where liquid, quicksilver lightning / shakes the foundations of the mind / and rocks the questing heart….” Poems of sorrow and dashed hope arrive at the joyful conclusion in the beautifully rhymed final poem: “…something still breathes … alive in the paint.”
—Pam Galloway, author of Passing Stranger and Parallel Lines
Inanna Admin –
The Path of Loneliness by Candice James
reviewed by The Minerva Reader – November 2020
https://theminervareader.com/
Extraordinary and uplifting. I particularly loved the poems in “Spirit”. This is a collection to carry in your purse and reach for as a meditation or reflection or perhaps to help you take a breath, gather perspective and momentum and then continue on only less alone, and less lonely, than you were moments before.
Here is an excerpt from “A Tricky Thing”:
The past is a tricky thing:
a cavalcade of images
sometime dissolved in water;
sometimes etched in stone.
…
In the stone-cold aftermath of the tricky past,
Or at the bottom of the half-full glass of the shaky present;
somewhere, at the quantum level,
in our house of mirrors
in our own personal universe,
the present becomes obsessed with its own distorted past
and wonders…
how it ever got this way.