Lucille Lang Day: Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place

I wish there were 1/2 stars for the Goodreads ratings, because this poetry collection has only what I'd call technical or editing flaws, so it deserves a 4 1/2.

(15 April, 2021 The Berkeley Times, "Too Cold, Too Hot, Just Right:") After a long, hard week of reading other poets' difficult and abrasive poetry, Lucille Lang Day’s Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place relieved my double headache. She writes with the confidence that knows she deserves it, because she’s hiked in, worked hard, sweated for decades and knows every step of what she wants to write, and how.

What I’d call a star of the Poetry Flash Watershed and other Bay Area and California readings, Mastermind of Scarlet Tanager Press, Lang Day’s talent’s taken for granted by her editors and publishers. They let a subject and verb disagreeing slip by in the first poem and let her put the newer travelogueish poems (not as good?) in the front, but these are minor "errors," not poetic power.

I almost thought it was too easy for her Painting Passionate Love for the World in All Her Magnificence with Words in the first chapter until the fifth poem, the one about her daughter’s death, a Mother’s impossible hope. A deep and immortal human truth...

Perfect. Spare. Real. Succinct. Her pain clutched around and choked my heart like a glove. We ALL feel a lot like that right now, looking at our Mother Earth...

Maybe she wasn't talking about that, just talking about her daughter, and her own dream, a dream of her daughter she'd had, and hope. But...

"I held / her hand and told her, over and over, / Hang onto hope, Liana. You can still / get better, as though my love could / scratch a diamond or hold back the night."

Sheer description and heart-work serves her better than exotic descriptions of flowers and birds, but at her best she is IN the world of nature, not talking about it from a distance, though her "science brain" serves her well.

She balances that brain with guts and heart. No distance, no bravado, HER REAL VOICE, no posturing to “I Have The Truth” nor taking-any-truth-that-happens-to-come-along-and-blowing-it-up-if-she-thinks-it’s-clever/going-to-sell.

I felt calm. Not dumb, not sold, not intimidated but calm. Right here. I’m in good hands…

Confirmed. Inspired.

I write about her too much, too often; but, you know what?  

She deserves every word.

“I close

my eyes; the sea rocks me to sleep.”

 

Blue Light Press, 1st World Publishing, PO Box 2211, Fairfield, IA, 52556. www.bluelightpress.com
"Blue Light Press is dedicated to the publication of poetry, fiction and flash fiction that is imagistic, inventive, emotionally honest, and pushes the language to a deeper level of insight. We are all poets and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and our books are artistically designed."