of blood, rust colored, where I pricked a finger?
See how intricately the pattern is made?
one suspects that the intricately patterned stitchery isn't made of cloth, but of the poet's words piecing their visual, sonic, and olfactory quilts. Given that this is the title poem, and a meta-poem bequeathing the poems themselves, "To Stitch a Summer Sky" may have been better placed at the collection's opening or conclusion. These poems are predominately concerned with what remains behind, and this poem is one answer to that question.
little at all of beauty.
While some of the poems have contemporary signifiers, a pack of Marlboros, a trip to the grocery store, most of them are timelessly staged in nature and in the mind of the speaker. There is very little irony or humor in To Stitch a Summer Sky. This indelible sincerity, occasionally veering towards sentimentality, is the collection's greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
Melissa Dickson Blackburn is a poet and marketing executive in Auburn. Her first collection of poems, Cameo, is forthcoming from New Plains Press.