Beyond the Moon's White Claw

As the poet tells us, her book is an autobiographical chronology of marriage, divorce, PTSD survival, and life in the present tense. Along the way, Pieczka’s imaginative lexicon expresses intimacy, “I hold his voice / in my hands. / It pulses, silks / through my fingers” while invoking the subtleties of sound: “How did she escape her satin-lined / eternity of formaldehyde and rouge, / a hole through her heart / from her husband’s rage.” Poems like “Grief,” “Graveside” and “If I Could” are keen insights into relationships, while “Memorial Wall for Survivors,” “The Bus from Aleppo” and “Another Shooting” speak eloquently to violence and PTSD. The tapestry of the book closes with verses crafted by sensitivity and unique imagery, such as “Night sits on my ribs / and stirs a breeze, / makes the curtains sway / but steals my breath.” Pieczka’s imaginative poems weave with seamless poignancy several decades of her life. I invite everyone to share with Patty Dickson Pieczka her remarkable journey that is Beyond the Moon’s White Claw. – Alan Britt, Lost Among the Hours, Towson University

How can one write about war, divorce, suicide, and loss without horror or bitterness, denial or abnegation? Patty Dickson Pieczka takes her grief by the hand and walks out into the world, acknowledging her pain but concentrating on the fullness of other people’s lives, whether they are ill-fated or beautiful. Lyrical veins run through the rough-edged chronicle of this woman’s life. The poems glow black and red under the pressure of the war-crafted suicide she bore, endured, and nurtured in the cauldron of her love. “A corona showers him” and “the moon follows him” but it is his voice that she holds in her hands as she scrubs the floor whose “invisible stains never come out.” Patty Dickson Pieczka moves gently between the stark reality of divorce and death, self-doubt and illusion, and the slightly off-centered transcendence that allows the reader to assume the mood of the poems. Verbs of ordinary life carry the poems, “blame,” “straggle,” “apologize,” “whispers,” “search,” and “vanish.” The adjectives belong to war and death, and the omnipresence of the moon in all its aspects, real and mythological. What shines in her life? The beauty and power of friendship and the natural world, the fulfillment of self-knowledge, and indelible love in all its silken destructiveness. Her language is crystalline; the pauses between sections are filled with longing, a primeval aching to become and to be in the purity of love and desire. This book chronicles the lives of those closest to her and depicts immense compassion and altruism. Pieczka ends Beyond the Moon’s White Claw with a love song that celebrates the immensity of love and the concreteness of mortality: “Hold to our branch and whisper / your song of riffling leaves / before the wind clips our stems / to whirl us / back to earth / in our separate turns. / We have only / until the moon blinks.” – Andrea Moorhead

Beyond the Moon's White Claw finds distinctive and palpable beauty in all those emotional passages that haunt us--death, violence, and the fragility of the human psyche when subjected to both. This book guides readers through a particular maze of memories with its lucid and enduring imagery. The voice here is that of a sure and mature poet, a writer who has come to terms with pain and shock and turned those emotions into wisdom. The narrative power accumulates here into a portrait of a marriage, that however troubled, gives this book's reader a profound sense of life lived through moments both ordinary and passionate, vibrant and still. – Allison Joseph