Loose Leaf Notes

-This review of my poetry collection, along with a small selection of my poems from the book, is in the current issue of Floyd County Moonshine, which features one of my photographs on the cover.    

Colleen Redman’s new chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife, is an intriguing collection. The poems, rich with imagery and introspection, resonate with an original voice grounded in a range of experiences.  Intelligent and compassionate, they promise to draw in readers with their layering of dream and day, of past and present, of insight and story.

Realistic with tinges of the surreal, the poems read well one by one and as a group.  As a group, the poems belong together because of the themes, of course, the attention to loss and the passing of time, but also because of the way they find different ways to define dream within the context of a lifetime of the narrator’s thinking. Repeated images from domestic life and the natural world appear across the collection are like signposts.

Dreams can be inside the mind by day or night.  They can be lucid or hidden.  They can call us to the past, as in “I Put You on Speakerphone,” or the future, as in “The Suitcase.”  Sometimes dreams are winsome.  Other times, they offer a context for visions and envisioning. Dreaming is as big as the mind of an adult who also remembers the child.

In “Black Bear,” a poem inspired by the burial of a father, we hear how “it took a woman / to break the glass / and to dream the fear loose.”  The child and the woman are one in this poem, the woman’s “trap” the girl’s “safe haven.”  Here, as in other poems, there are no easy resolutions between dreaming and waking. In this case, “The dreamer must wake up.”  This careful attention to the relationship between adult and child is found in a number of poems.

“Flying Dreams” contrasts images from nature to help show the contrast between the security of the natural world with its “brown chameleon” and “cocooned pupae.”   The human mind, the “I” of the narrator, is conscious of its place in a world with color purchased, “insurance,” “paper money.”  At the center of this poem is a contrast between the imagination of childhood, when “we believed ‘ that we were angels in training.”  “Dreams about flying” are lost like innocence, on the one hand.  But on the other, with poems that remember them, they are not.

In “The Collector,” Redman writes, “Let me steal a few moments / to collect an intuition / to look an untold story in the eye.”  She has done just that in this collection: she has, paradoxically, told the untold, touching on that which resides in both dreams and in life and in the borders between. These poems go deep because, as “The Suitcase” notes, “Poetry is a passport / in the universal mother tongue.”

As I read the poems, I find myself repeating phrases and lines, as if finding new maxims to ponder (for example, “birds don’t sing for my entertainment,” from “Teacher’s Pet”). My favorite lines in the whole book, of many contenders, are from “Jim and Dan”:  “My brothers live like postcards now / I write, “I wish you were still here” / on the back of each one.”  This simile that exemplifies the combination of craft and insight is just one reason I hope to entice you to look for more.

Note:  Felicia Mitchell is a poet and creative writing teacher at Emory and Henry College whose most recent book of poems is Waltzing with Horses from Press 53.  Copies of Floyd County Moonshine and Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife are available in Floyd at The Harvest Moon and noteBooks. Moonshine can also be purchased from their website and Packing a Suitcase for the Afterlife can be purchased at Finishing Line Press and at Amazon.com. I’ll be reading from the book at the Blacksburg Library on December 10 at 2:00 with Chelsea Adams.