Postcards from a Summer Girl [Paperback]

C. E. Laine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2004

Imagine a missing poet; vanished, without a trace. What’s left is this box of notes and postcards she’s written. Some stranger enters her vacant rooms, finds these things, and is left to imagine a life and an identity for this wisp of words. I’d like to begin this new collection with that bit of semi-fiction. It interests me to think of a character and a setting that could be consistent with these poems. This is a new approach. Earlier collections have been done with sub-sections, and lots of definitions in the footnotes, which was something of my earlier trademark. This new assortment of poems is really a collection of observations and reflections , some of them cathartic, others merely note-jotting. Much of it is whimsy, with a touch of grit around the edges.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Poignant paintings of memory, death, loss and healing - well written, filled with remarkable empathy and truth of life's consequence. -- Little Poem Press, Michael Paul Ladanyi, August 2004

About the Author

CE LAINE is not really missing. She divides her time between writing and flying old airplanes. She avoids the mundane whenever possible, with the exception of making lists. She is a student pilot, a realtor, and a web designer when she isn't writing. In the past, she's been a magician's assistant, a baker, an extra in a few movies, a licensed artist in New Orleans' French Quarter, and a soldier in this girl's U. S. Army. She lives in a creaking old Virginia home, conveniently ruled by seven cats. She enjoys making lists on sticky notes when she isn't writing poems. She's also left-handed. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize (The Metastatic Whatnot), her work has appeared in SaucyVox, Poems Niederngasse, New World Poetry, Free Zone Quarterly, Poetry Super Highway, Countless Horizons, The White Shoe Irregular, Bay Review Liberal Arts Journal, Friction Magazine, 2River View, Kota Press, Absinthe, Stirring (writing as Kit Sullivan), Clean Sheets, Erosha, Beauty for Ashes! , Ludlow Press, Pierian Springs, Thunder Sandwich, MiPo~Print, Adirondack Review, AnotherSun and The Melic Review, among others. She is also a contributor to "In Their Own Words; a generation defining itself" Vols. 3 and 4. Her collection of poetry entitled "The Poverty of Birds" appears in the anthology Before the Last Shadow Fades – A Shadow Poetry Collection Vol. 3 (22 poems). She has written two previous books of poetry, Allegory and The Weight of Dust. More information about the poet and her work is available at www.celaine.com.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 105 pages
• Publisher: Sun Rising Poetry Press (September 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0975595539
• ISBN-13: 978-0975595534
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,584,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Summer Girl for All Seasons, August 30, 2005

By 

Cheryl Snell (Washington DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Postcards from a Summer Girl (Paperback)

In C.E. Laine's new book, Postcards from a Summer Girl, the reader is asked to assemble the biography of a missing poet from a box of notes and postcards. Unblinking observations are among Ms. Laine's strengths, and in concise language and resonant images, she improvises one life's mythology.

The poet uses color like a character and space like a painter. Each color inhabits its own emotional space, drawing the reader in or distancing him, giving the poems the presence of paintings. In "Hush!"

the white room
defines memory
in syncopated time.

And in the poem "White," the speaker says

Oh, I have changed the sheets.
I keep washing them, but white
fades only into itself.

The color blue can connote bruising but in "Love Theory in Blue," a lover

would gather forget-me-nots
beneath the Danube, tuck periwinkle posies
in her hair, press his mouth against
each eyelid and call her indigo

Sensation overlaps sound with color in "What Remains," about the aftermath of a loved one's alcoholic binge:

my hand flickered-
caught a fire that raged in my arm.
The sound was light sparking
off shards of glass.

In "How it Sounds," a humiliation is a synesthetic experience:

In the third grade, bus-stop taunts pinched
my cheeks a brighter shade than marker, words
I can't recall now, only the rumble of a train
hauling coal or lumber, low and wretched
over the tight tracks laid in my throat,
as if it wanted to close like a fist.

When a character first glimpsed in "Always (notes on a refrigerator)" weaves his way through "Removing Bandages" and surfaces again in "Abalone Moon," the effect is collage-like. Ms. Laine shows us that perspective is sometimes gained at a remove, in a certain painting by Goya, in life. As the poems modulate from haiku to free-verse narratives on a range of topics, the poet mourns losses such as a shattered marriage reflected in a son's eyes, illness and death, hereditary physical weaknesses.

But Ms. Laine is not content to chronicle darkness; she also welcomes solace offered by nature and the erotics of daily life. Lovers are likened to spoons in separate drawers in one poem, compared with "perfume" in another. Lovemaking is like "Making Colors" in a third. "How I Say Soul in a Poem" conjures up this sense-memory:

It's a million absent colors;
the way my hand remembers
being held

Flying and falling are motifs established and returned to, as in the Pushcart Prize nominated "Windblown," where the speaker says

I have scattered
myself over terrain that looks
different from this altitude.

"On Metaphysics," the poet observes

I interviewed the air and then
the ground; their descriptions
were consistent with my own.
Radar data has nothing to do with this.

This collection is the third full length offering by C.E. Laine, and one that deepens with each reading.