Independent Publishers of New England (IPNE) Award for Best Poetry Scudder H. Parker's poetry debut is a compilation of early experience, midlife discovery, and later-life thankfulness. Safe as Lightning is pervaded by sadness about the current direction of our human experiment, and hope for what it might be for us to become respectful citizens living in a thriving and diverse world. A lifetime of observation, experience, and discovery of the amazing richness of the inner, human, and natural worlds; a total delight in the freedom and disciplines of language; a search for justice; and the practice of humility, have all inspired the poems contained within.