Dancing Through Seafoam by Diane Skye Gropper
Diane Skye Gropper‘s poetry collection, Dancing Through Seafoam, is an ambitious book that asks readers to consider love, loss and the state of the world through the lens of reincarnation and Buddhist philosophy. It is a personal project as Gropper explains in her author’s note that many of these poems grew out of what she experiences as memories of past lives.
The book is organized into three thoughtfully sequenced sections. “Love Goes On” opens the collection with poems about people the speaker has loved across lifetimes: a devastating tribute to a miscarried child in “In Absentia,” a star-crossed romance spanning centuries in “Casablanca” and a wrenching neighborly reckoning in “Pax Romana,” where two people who feel inexplicably drawn to each other slowly recognize an unfinished story from a previous life. These poems succeed because Gropper never leans too hard on the reincarnation conceit as explanation; instead she uses it to access very ordinary, very human feelings such as grief, longing, guilt and forgiveness. She makes the fantastical premise feel almost beside the point.
Spiritual Truths and Human Feelings
The middle section, “Spiritual Truths,” shifts into a more contemplative register. Here the standout is “Rinpoche,” a narrative poem structured almost like a parable, following a boy who climbs a mountain seeking a jewel and finds, instead, an old monk willing to teach him. It’s a lovely piece of storytelling that trusts its own patience, letting the lesson arrive gently rather than being stated outright. Elsewhere in this section, Gropper turns her attention inward with poems on mindfulness, karma, and the slow work of self-understanding, and even closes the book with a playful haiku sequence celebrating the act of writing poetry itself.
The final section, “Darkening Firmament,” is the collection’s most urgent stretch and its strongest. “Nine-One-One,” a prose poem built around a recurring nightmare of being trapped in a burning building, is gripping, and its final image — waking to make coffee while still feeling the heat rise — lands with precision. “Bombus,” a poem told from the perspective of a bumblebee, manages to be both tender and devastating as an elegy for the natural world. And “War of the Worlds” builds a taut emotional arc out of a single-word anaphora — tears, grief, guilt, fear, rage, peace — that gives the poem incantatory momentum. These pieces confront climate anxiety, political division and species loss without ever curdling into lecture; the anger is always in service of feeling, not argument.
Poetry Across Lives and a Changing World
Gropper moves comfortably between free verse, prose poetry, formal haiku and a striking bracketed-refrain form in “Pax Romana” that functions almost like a second voice commenting on the poem as it unfolds. Her imagery is concrete and often maritime or elemental which gives the collection a cohesive sensory vocabulary even as the subject matter ranges widely across decades and, notionally, lifetimes. Readers don’t need to share Gropper’s spiritual framework to feel the pull of these poems; the emotional truths she’s after — that we are shaped by what and whom we’ve loved, that grief and gratitude are often the same instinct wearing different clothes — are accessible on their own terms.
Dancing Through Seafoam is a warm, searching and moving collection. It’s the kind of book that rewards being read slowly, a poem or two at a time, and it will resonate with readers drawn to poetry that treats spirituality, grief and the natural world as inseparable threads of the same long dance.
About Diane Skye Gropper:
Diane Skye Gropper has spent more than 45 years as a professional writer, working as a journalist, editor, and marketing strategist in the financial industry. A graduate of the College of William & Mary with advanced studies in economics, she continues to write in a regulatory capacity in the securities industry. A lifelong reader and writer of poetry, Skye’s decades of studying Buddhism and other spiritual traditions inspire Dancing Through Seafoam, her first published poetry collection.
