The poems collected in Chrysalis in Amber convey religious and universal truths in a grand yet accessible manner.
Themes of farm life, travel, and love weave into Elmer Epp’s poetry collection Chrysalis in Amber, which alternates between the quotidian and the sacred.
These free verse poems, written across decades, are rife with religious and literary allusions. Faust and Oscar Wilde make appearances, alongside Jesus and various angels. Prisoners, vagrants, and addicts live and die, seeking communities, forgiveness, and families.
Elegiac tones emerge, as in “Broken Chalice,” about children born “in the shadows of the Bomb”—Baby Boomers who protested the Vietnam War and supported the civil rights movement, only to realize later that, in protecting their own children, they had lost their way. And in “Dade County,” a priest collects confessions from prisoners who have been
sentenced to death, who are “so very cold” and frightened, while those who condemned them stand assured of their own places in heaven." -Foreword Clarion Review
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