Persistence of Vision by Donna Isaac

 

“Open Donna Isaac‘s Persistence of Vision and be immediately caught up in a luscious poem moving across the page à la the first moving pictures. Thereafter , ‘reveries in misty blue,’ the old flicks you watched while ‘chomping’ down goodies, bring back Fred Astaire, Kate Hepburn, Hattie McDaniel, the Beatles, Shirley Temple, Ginger Rogers and Busby Berkeley. And more! Isaac’s are lip-smacking poems of sadness and goodness. With her rambunctious pleasure in words and obvious love for her subjects, Persistence becomes a silver screen temple in itself. Rating? ****”

–Sharon Chmielarz (author of  little eternities and The J Horoscope)

 

In Persistence of Vision, Donna Isaac celebrates the role of movies in her life with an exuberant facility of diction, image, and sound. An homage to Charlie Chaplin, tells us, “We like prat-falling in the rain/dangling from industrial cogs, and toddling off into the sunset…”  I also enjoy the way Isaac weaves the details of everyday life into her poems. In “Kiddie Matinees, her mother, ignorant of the “mayhem showing at the Saturday matinee”… “wanted us out of the house / so she could pine-sol the tile.” “Seeking” ends with Dorothy Gale back home with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, “de-tasseling corn, canning tomatoes, helping Zeke slop the hogs.” My favorite poem in this joyful, poignant, and witty collection is “Songcatcher”:

 

I’d like to roam the mountains of North Carolina

wading in cold streams, warblers, veeries, and siskins

on the wing, fog awash on peaks,

the drama of Tanawha, sedges and spruce,

and collect tunes from folks who know

“Mary of the Wild Moor,” “Moonshiner,”

and “Fair and Tender Ladies,” crooned and warbled

on front porch chairs, salamanders askitter

in the goldenrod, silverlings dancing in the moonlight,

and all the cliff edges alive with avens.

My backpack filled with poetry,

I’d hike back down, push play, bake cornbread,

cook butter beans, sit a spell and rock back and forth,

back and forth, humming, eyes closed,

floating on reveries of misty blue.

–Patricia Barone (author of Your Funny, Funny Face)