Book Review :: Blue on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson

Review by Jami Macarty

In Blue on a Blue Palette, Lynne Thompson sings “Blues got me and gone” to “Say woman,” to claim her voice, her yes, and to say no. To “arrange a resistance,” the poet speaks with candor about the female body, desire, and aging, speaks from “anguish” about male violence against females and police violence against people of color, and, determined not to “fail history,” she claims her role as “a daughter” who has “lived to tell you this” about the “Blue Water” “sorry with our bones.” Dear Reader, “how the choices are few for / those who ignore women in revolution.”

To “forsake the grim, / or shake the shadows,” Thompson “practice[s]” in poems in a variety of forms from abecedarian and villanelle to cento. By my count, there are nine centos in the collection. What the ekphrastic form is to painting, the cento is to poetry. Derived from the Latin word “patchwork,” the cento offers the poet an associative compositional mode and a formal device by which she recontextualizes the writing and accentuates the voices of poets Ai, Wanda Coleman, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, and Sonia Sanchez, among others, as relevant, even essential, in lives “long as this.”

“Say history. Claim. Say wild.” As resistance engenders insistence, the poems of Blue on a Blue Palette “praise” survival, suggesting Lucille Clifton’s lines: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” Like Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me,” among other poems, Thompson’s poems express strength of self.

Celebrating her identity as woman and poet of color, acknowledging the “unnumbered regrets” of history, and honoring the friendship of poets in life and on the page, Blue on a Blue Palette is Lynne Thompson’s “praise-song.”

Blue on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson. BOA Editions, April 2024.

Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.