Review by Martin Abramson
PAINTING THE EGRET’S ECHO
By Patty Dickson Pieczka
The Bitter Oleander Press 2013
Fayettville, NY
$16.00, 81 pp, Paper
Reprinted from Book/Mark, Summer 2015
It’s rare
for a weary reviewer to be sent a book with a delight on almost every page and Painting the egret’s echo delights me no
end. Mrs. Pieczka (pronounced PYECH-ka) writes in free verse stanzas sans rhyme, but with every other poetic
device. Indeed, a good many of her poems are about words and writing itself.
From “The Lineage of Ink”:
Ink lurks in the
blood,
learning
secrets.
…
Hieroglyphs
and calligraphy
wind their cursive tongues
to
feed on goat hide,
clay
or papyrus scrolls,
to drink the phrases
that nourish a ravenous
pen.
In “A Winter
Poem”
Soup
stock boils in the kitchen
this
snow-laced afternoon.
The
poem begins with a page of steam.
My
fingers squeak across its window…
In Polish,
sounds
purl
like water in tiny
rivulets,
a diphthong drops
from
the mourning dove’s beak,
wings
opening to the sun.
Nature imagery is everywhere:
Tonight
I become the forest
and
weave my hair into vines…
Or
This
morning a ram’s skull
Rose
in the east…
She
lifts
a finch’s feather
and
becomes weightless,
floats
to the crown
of
a hickory and finds
that
her hollow bones
can
whistle like flutes.
And finds:
…a world beneath soil
among constellations
of bulbs, potatoes,
a sky of onions.
The heat of “A Jalapeno” inspires an
image of “a prairie surviving/ only when its grasses are grazed/ by fire that
chews through purple/ mallow and lemon mint…”
Or:
Leaves
scattering through
the
tunnel of trees
ripple
grass with their
shadows…
In “Rose Madder” the poet lists dyes for
her boiling vat: “bloodroot/and larkspur…goldenrod…oak galls…woad…saffron near
the foot of the ginko…sumac and indigo…”
Many poems describe a lover:
Your
dream spills out
and
trails fireflies
along
a curve of evening
winding
toward night.
From “Drinking the Moon”: “She traces the hollow/ of
his throat, as though/ her fingertips/ might discern the truth/ in his words.”
In “Tradewinds”, at a tropical wedding where “The
ocean plays a calypso/ of wave-splash and clicking shells…”
Saronged
guests wing an ivory
whirlwind
of rice that clings to him
in
a flash of glinting sun. In the
wedding
photos, he is already gone.
After a breakup in “Finale”
I
no longer wore the negligee woven
from sultry wisps of his breath. It
hung,
dissolving
in the closet
with
the bones of our first touch.
From the woman who receives Van Gogh’s
ear:
What
emptiness feeds
your
martyred hunger
to
offer me
this
fleshy curl
of
bass clef that drips
its
lowest notes in blood…
Some poems have medical themes as in ”The Diagnosis”
which “slides/ from my doctor’s pen,/ an
inky snake…” follows through her daily routines and “winds around me…” at
night. “A Curvature of Bone” sees the
spine as a “rock strewn path” “partially covered with sand…and threaded
together/ with tenuous ligaments”.
“Voices of Touch” is a moving evocation of Helen
Keller’s sensory world.
“Rocky Bluff” brings déjà vu to a familiar valley before history where “…I will
return…/when I am wearing/
different bones.”
“Pieces of Winter” etches a world where wind plays
icicles “like a xylophone” and
As
we walk the frozen
shoreline,
snow memorizes
the
shapes of our boots
our
immortality…
I hope it’s not sexist to observe that
these poems have the delicacy and sensitivity that clearly identify them as a
woman’s handiwork. And this is by no means to dismiss them as anything less
than superbly crafted literary emanations. As a man, I have often wondered about
the workings of the female mind, and I’m grateful to admit that reading Mrs.
Pieczka’s oeuvre may be as close as I can get to its mysteries.