Review by Janet McCann

BLUE, CANDLED IN JANUARY SUN
by Sybil Pitmann Estess

WordTech Communications
PO Box 541106
Cincinnati, OH 45254
ISBN# 1933456035
2005, 92pp., $17.00
www.wordtechcommunications.com

Sybil Estess is a poet of Southwestern vision. Her Texas is historical and current, and her imagery communicates a persuasive brand of Southern feminism. Estess writes mostly about women of middle age, surrounded by family and friends. The speaker’s story mingles with those of others: Bible women, friends, relatives, chance encounters; multiple voices emerge from a single consciousness.

Estess’s observations of the world are a little like Robert Frost’s, but with a distinctive woman’s turn. Frost provided a male perspective on gender difference, reflected in his male and female characters’ divergent perceptions of the natural world. The male/rational was the superior. Estess gives us the woman’s view and the primacy of her values: connectivity, friendship, family links, nourishment, loyalty, persistence. Also, she, like Frost, reads nature for its relevance to humanity, but Estess’s nature is layered with transcendence. In “Blowing Sand May Exist” the husband reasons about what this posted warning means while the wife feels. “I had been meditating as we whizzed by. / I didn’t even see it. ‘It may / exist,’ he reasoned, ‘it also may not.’ / All I knew was that grit got in my eye.” The two visions merge: “…Warned, we wait for the wind.” Both kinds of understanding are needed, the male logocentric and the female gnostic, to understand the world.

Estess is a keen observer of the social fabric and the rents and snags in it, as well as of the mystery of personality. War and injustice are often suggested by the individual stories she encounters; in “Blooms from Bogota,” she describes the cost of beauty in human suffering. The many transactions in these poems bring about glimpses of others’ lives. Things exchanged are symbols and sacramentals, and the act of giving or even buying becomes a female ritual of connection.

Stylistically, Estess’s, work is fascinating for its combination of metrics and speech patterns. Some poems are conversational free verse, but others use rhyme and rhythm subtly, so that there is a pull between natural speech patterns and the metrical frame. The rhymes are sometimes casual and slant, the unobtrusive music of the poem. Sound-echoes, gentle alliteration, and assonance help carry this music. Blue, Candled in January Sun is a powerful collection to be shared, discussed, remembered.

–from Rattle #25, Summer 2005

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Janet McCann‘s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Award in Poetry. Her most recent books are Emily’s Dress (Pecan Grove Press 2004) and Pascal Goes to the Races (WordTech Communications 2004).