Shade of Blue Trees

Finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Poetry Book Prize.The poems of Kelly Cressio-Moeller's Shade of Blue Trees offer up an intimate surrealism, earth-born, deeply shaded, and tinted the deep blue of solitude, memory, and myth, turning "yearning's blue fire/into a dreamscape fugue." Nowhere is Cressio-Moeller's virtuosity more apparent than in the sequence of "panels." These pieces function as lyric poems, language-paintings, fairy tales, and compressed novels, somehow removed from time, with a lushness that reminds me of Flaubert-without the meanness. For instance: "A wall-eyed jay cracks a cherry's/skull against the cheekbone of dusk," and "Cornflower satin, heels on parquetry-she orders/nests for her hair to keep skylarking near, wears the/clouds on her finger to be swallowed in vapor." There are poems that walk the territory of the actual, from mother-loss, which winters the tips of the speaker's hair, to embodiment: "without my cervix I am no less queen/open me, see there's nothing left to give." Indeed this collection is evidence of a queendom that has been cultivated via solitude, loss, and time. "For years," she writes, "her poemwork involved dipping arrows/into tinctures of monkshood. Beneath her shawl of/suffering, she yearned only for two gifts: to be seen, to be understood." With the unveiling of Shade of Blue Trees, those gifts have been delivered. Diane Seuss