Windows Where There Had Been Walls: a review of Gathering the Pieces of Days by LeeAnn Pickrell. Unsolicited Press. Portland, OR. 2025. $17.95 paper, $7.95 Kindle.
The poems in Gathering the Pieces of Days consist of word collages and narratives. Selectivity is key, as past and present intersect. Nature; earth, wind, water, and fire; culture, namely art, music, and literature; social, political, and historical events; domestic entities; animals; friends, and family comprise the poet’s days. Intuition is key. Keen attentiveness to a word or a word group’s properties of sight, sense, and sound is essential in the poet’s discovering the extraordinary of daily life and making it into a poem.
Ultimately the poem on the page is a poem when it’s read. Images bring about this relationship of poet and reader; they evoke inclusivity. LeeAnn Pickrell’s days are replete with arresting images. What happens in any given day is that people make mistakes. “Josh’s morning confession of accidentally mixing in decaf with the regular all week” (10) evokes a tactile image for anyone who’s ever opened a container of coffee. Not a major mistake, but it happened repeatedly. Josh’s admission suggests a guilt that won’t result in sleepless nights. This ordinary mistake is made extraordinary because of how it appears at the end of a poem in which coffee grounds are not shown but clearly suggested. People depend on one another. “C tosses a key from her balcony” (17) to someone who perhaps will watch her apartment (water C’s plants?) while she is away. Just as “Hills …alive with lupine and wild cucumber” (38) is a panorama of nature’s vibrancy, this ballpark image reflects vibrance, and exuberance within the self:
at the Giants game in San Francisco
with Ghirardelli hot chocolate
and a Pablo Sandoval foul ball
—my first foul ball!—
in the bottom of the eighth
raising my arm above my head
victorious (33)
“Glass walls looking into yards / where children play” (59) evokes vitality, and “a photograph of my parents / on their wedding day, December 5 / fifty-six years ago …” (87) evokes reflection, and draws readers into the day, into the poem.
In Gathering the Pieces of Days, the sense or meaning of a word group is conveyed figuratively to make what perhaps started as journal entries into poems. In the second week of February “I sit …holding / three deaths in two weeks in my hand” (18), and the speaker’s specification of her losses makes her readers know, and thus care. She cares, in this oxymoronic line, about things “discovered in an old new world” (25). In the third week of April, chiasmus conveys irony as she states “A friend has decided to live as a blind person who can see / rather than a sighted person who can’t” (34). Who is the speaker? A writer, a reader, an editor, and more. She tells her readers “Home is the books I carry from one dwelling to the next” (58), a place, a landscape “with Diablo winds / in between sentences” (72). This place of wind and rain and inner weather does not lack for humor. Irony and repetition lend sarcasm and self-depreciation to this passage in which no one gets hurt.
I overhear a woman going on about her book editor
for her soon-to-be-published book.
I think first: I hate her.
I think second: well, she might have an editor
but I am an editor.
Jealousy? Not really. Just the poet having a bit of fun.
Who is the poet? A daughter, a partner in a relationship, a cat lover, an Oakland Athletics (baseball) fan. Hear the music in the spoken word: “The A’s walk off in the bottom of the 11th on a single by Lucroy” (55), the brusque “walk off” in variation with the euphonic “single by Lucroy.” Repetition, syllabic variation, and alliteration comprise the strong rhythms of these lines: “for chihuahua salt and pepper shakers / and a red-chili-pepper-shaped salsa bowl” (15). There’s immediacy in the sounds of “the vase of roses rolling across the floor” (42), and in
I hear Henry in the next room
jump off the bed and skitter
a toy mouse across the floor
spirit cat
With the modulation in tone, from the casual “Running into a neighbor’s sister at Zachary’s pizza” (50), followed by white space, to the emphatic “She remembers Josh’s kindness when her brother / was dying” (50), Pickrell amply shows that one difference between poetry and prose is in the sound.
Along with the extraordinary in day-to-day life, there’s the catastrophic reality of a massacre “at a synagogue in Pittsburgh” (74) and the poignant memory of a father. “His last question / when I said I loved him, Really?” (89). There’s also the strengthening of the bond between mother and daughter in the final poem’s “Telling my mother what I’ve always / wanted to say: she’s a hero to me.” The lesson readers take from Gathering the Pieces of Days, this book of finely crafted poems, is that they were written first and foremost by a human being.
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