If you’ve ever wanted to step into the ecstasy of a poet laureate or to deliver a riveting poetry reading and then head out to choose the cover for your latest book, you have  come home.  Poets have created some odd legacies. Edgar Allan Poe wrote with "Catarina," his cat, on his shoulder, and Dame Edith Sitwell prepped by lying in an open coffin to get her own creative juices flowing; you will find this text more mainstream. It delineates a coherent method as it inculcates the skill-building savvy required to avoid years of grueling apprenticeship with little risk of coffin or cat allergies.

First Light offers a survey of the poetic landscape as well as a compass: a faith in your own compass. And while it won’t create either instant poetry or coffee, it does provide a fast track: an antidote for years of flailing. It also acts as a catapult or jump-start. Your time and expertise will now be focused, as you part company with rank beginners.

To achieve competency in any field you need an awareness of its intellectual and emotional geography to assure your own resilience. If that awareness is combined with instruction in appropriate skills, and an easy-to-follow method is then implemented, Voila!  Success. Sounds simple.  While it’s easy to envision, it’s deceptively difficult to realize or to measure. Lao Tzu warned, if you do not change direction you may end up where you are going. This guide assists with vital detours or any redirect.

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Sally Naylor, unrepentant rascal, remains a perennial gypsy. This wordsmith enjoys the water birds on her lake in Coral Springs, Florida, for now. Poet, counselor & teacher, Sally taught & wrote curricula for gifted, peer counseling & AIDS education classes. Today poetry workshops, travel, yoga & alligator wrestling keep her out of trouble. Mostly. Her first collection, Firebird (PP Books), a story of regeneration, is available on Amazon, as are her memoir, Rogue Nirvana (Lioncrest Press) & two additional volumes: Heresies & Sweet Basil & Riffs (PP Books). She took the lead in editing an anthology of her local Broward County Florida poetry workshop, Slay Your Darlings: An Anthology by the No Name Poets, (PP Books) published December 2016. First Light provides a commonsense guide that advocates for attitudes that keep poetic and personal demons at bay and presents models and a method requisite to a neophyte’s success. Naylor’s first creative writing curricula of innovative strategies for fledgling writers will be published April 2017.  Look for accompanying workbooks of the same title, volumes two through four, which debut in the summer of 2017.