Lynne Thompson
Blue on a Blue Palette
BOA Editions
Reviewer: Erica Goss
In Blue on a Blue Palette, Lynne Thompson embarks on a journey through physical and personal geographies, exploring relationships, moods, and history, with a focus on the strength and resiliency of women. The color blue links these poems through direct and implied references. Blue, with its various and often contradictory associations, represents water, sky, cold, royalty, and the divine—it’s a musical form and the color of the Virgin Mary’s robes, so often depicted in classical paintings. In this book, blue is an oracle, delivering intuition with its own enigmatic motivations.
As Thompson writes in “Melancholia (a draft),” which, according to the notes, is “a cento comprised of lines—or variations of them—in the poems of Carl Phillips’ collection Riding Westward:”
transformed blue flower
*
Stop shaking.
Pretend there’s a choice.
*
The body isn’t an allegory—
history doesn’t fail, we fail history
while raptors’ faces
hover in the storm
The poem captures that inner dialogue we so often engage in when trying to convince ourselves, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that everything is wonderful and our fears inconsequential. “The body isn’t an allegory” underscores this expectation: no moral or hidden meaning lurks within the body’s myriad systems; most of the time, they operate independently of our desires. Even so, as Thompson writes, we “pretend there’s a choice,” a choice between accepting the situation at face value or examining it for motives we can comprehend.
The book opens with “A Confluence of Women,” an abecedarian that lists just a few of the occupations women have “assembled ourselves as:” “barmaids or burdens of proof, / courtesans or / drama.” A robust vein of defiance runs through the poem, as in the lines “Even a carpetbagger can’t sneer at any / undertaking we women might fashion for ourselves, / vigorous as we are,” the carpetbagger being any opportunist not impressed, indeed intimidated, by women’s talent for making the best of a bad situation.
In “Blue Haze,” inspired by Terrance Hayes’ “At Pegasus,” the color blue winds through the poem, grounding its brief, alluring lines. Menacing and voluptuous, the poem vibrates with tension:
We are a slippery crew—
blue in our gyre,
blue-black like maggots
and never sexless. We invent
a contagion when we steam,
when we revenge.
Jesus, what an irony!—
we women most holy
when wet, we sister-girls
who sprinkle suspicion onto a meadow – …
“Blue Haze” echoes the message in “A Confluence of Women:” oppressed people, in this case women, have no choice but to seek subversive paths to power, that “slippery crew // most holy / when wet.” That message returns in “Soar (again) (because)”: “we women soar / while planes fly only patterns.”
The healing properties of the sea, the “blue and green of it,” center the poem “The Sticking Point.” Opening with a quote from Mary Ruefle, “… the sea deep as love,” Thompson writes of the ocean’s calming influence: “See how sea enjoys a spirit of silence / in its eels, in its starfish?” This reverie links back to the line by Ruefle, “because // one poet dared to write the sea cold as / love and knew I would ponder // what she meant.” But the poem doesn’t end there. Instead, Thompson moves towards an unexpected insight: “how the choices are few for / those who ignore women in revolution.” Here is the “sticking point” of the title: the “content” of the sea is deceptive; pondering those lines while under its influence have opened a door of perception in the speaker.
The middle section of the book consists of a series of place poems, as Thompson zigzags up, down, back, and forth across the United States. In “Pale Blues,” she describes trees, grasses, “small towns, populations just a / blip,” and the landscape glimpsed from a speeding car: “red barns abandoned on a distant hill,” “road-kill and even more of it,” “Silos, // forgotten, rusted.” Seen through the poet’s eye, these signs of other lives are charged with meaning, leading to deeply affecting observations:
Abruptly, the sun burnishes half-
warmth along the straight-line loneliness
of byways—no cars ahead, a flatbed truck
at least two miles behind.
This roadside reverie brings on a mood of nostalgia: “All that was America once, fading in afterglow.”
The sea returns in “And it shall be in that day that living waters shall go out …,” which takes its title from Zechariah 14:8. The poem is filled with observations about the sea, i.e., “The sea is over the moon,” “The sea doesn’t get to vote,” and “sea is not as blue as you and I are.” These lines cast the sea as an entity beyond its place as an inspiration for human longings and personifications.
Thompson makes use of several poetic forms in the book, including the aforementioned abecedarian, as well as the pantoum, villanelle, sonnet and cento, a form made up of lines from existing poems. Thompson’s centos are of particular interest, as they add the voices of other poets into the mix, evoking fresh nuances and implications. She has a unique way of manipulating forms so that they sink into the background, not calling undue attention to themselves.
For example, “Frankly, when asked about the autonomy of my body, I consider my inner assassin,” is not only a cento but a pantoum. Thompson’s variations with line lengths, parentheses, and syntax disguise the repeated lines enough that the form dawns on the reader gradually. One must read the Notes section to discover that the poem is also constructed entirely of lines from the poetry of Terrance Hayes and Diane Suess. The effect of this collaged, repurposed language is striking:
(I betcha shapeshifters want souls like devils do:
their hinges turning,
the list of pallbearers still in a drawer somewhere,
an existential jambalaya;
their hinges turning,
a clamor or voltas or
some existential jambalaya?)
My only fear: fear of a virtuous mob—
Similarly, “sometimes, the light,” is a villanelle as well as a cento made up of lines from Joni Mitchell songs. This play of lyrics, remixed and reimagined, dissolves them into a new form both familiar and strange.
Lynne Thompson blends voices from her own life, history, popular culture, and the work of poets and musicians to form a powerful chorus. Guiding the reader through multiple levels of experience, she stretches the poetic form into new and compelling shapes, shimmering through many shades of blue.
