The Ellsworth American - Writing From the Heart

Writing From the Heart

Written by Carl Little

Thursday, February 22, 2007

In her fourth full-length book of poetry (she has also published two chapbooks), Patricia Ranzoni of Bucksport offers 29 sharply chiseled and often compact configurations of line and stanza, image and metaphor. Her poems reveal human-avian correspondences infused with emotion and empathy.

“Only Human: Poems from the Atlantic Flyway,” by Patricia Ranzoni, Sheltering Pines Press, Kennebunk, Maine.

Ranzoni is that “looking around human” in the opening poem, “Little Blue Shell in the Ditch,” who considers the mystery of a broken bird egg on the side of a road. Her awareness of her surroundings, time of year and time of day, heighten the vision she conveys. Walking barefoot at the end of winter (“Barely Iceout”) or taking an October dip in a local “clay bowl” (“Pond Life or What the Vesper Sparrow Couldn’t Tell”) represent episodes of chilly sensuality.

Many poems invoke hardscrabble Maine. In the lovely “Old Field Wife Come Spring,” the woman “knots a cotton napkin with hermits hot from the oven/into a migrant’s sack. Pours a jar of coldest milk,” before setting out to find her husband on his tractor pulling “barbed wire out of the ground.” Likewise, the poem “The July Fourth of Your Growth” offers a warm vision of life lived by a stove:

When you wake I shall barely skim the spider with pure butter
and brown you the oatmeal-molasses bread risen all night
and patty-caked to go with yesterday’s clover-fed eggs
and green tea in defense.

Pine Hen

She is just beyond how she dreams in this storm to live partridge-stepping limb to limb not alone wintering berries whenever the need blood’s red against all this snow bobcat colored feathered tiara hemlock cover higher higher

— Patricia Ranzoni

The world of wars and injustice rears its head from time to time. The poem “Hearings” (which also appears in the recent anthology “The Other Side of Sorrow: Poets Speak Out about Conflict, War, and Peace”) deals with the hope and futility of making oneself heard in the halls of government. “Whole peoples have vanished from distorted will,” Ranzoni reminds us and, later in the poem, states: “If our children could know what we do to some children/they would never in their lives dance again.”

Almost without exception Ranzoni’s poems require the reader’s undivided attention, and not just to mine the meaning of what is, at times, somewhat cryptic verse. A small typeface in a spindly font, which becomes even scrawnier when italicized, plus single-spaced lines, can exercise the eye.

Challenges aside, the rewards multiply with each reading. Whether expressing wonder at returning falcons (“Peregrinari”) or despair at America’s consumerism crowding out nature (“Nations and Their Sounds and the Fruits of Their Labor”), Ranzoni writes from the heart.

No one has commented on this article.