Ranzoni to share poetry

Maybe it’s because she moved away and then came back that Patricia Ranzoni so deftly mines memories of Maine – digging dandelion greens, baking beans for Saturday night, watering the cows, brushing against “touch me not” jewelweed until its buds pop.

In her latest collection of poems, “Settling,” published by Orono’s Puckerbrush Press, the University of Maine graduate not only illuminates what she saw and heard and touched in decades past, but seeks to kindle what her ancestors experienced centuries ago.

Many of the images are not limited by time, as shown by a portion of “In a Maine Valley Every April.”

She fires the spider cast-iron hot

with sizzling butter then when the lemon and melon spots

have crusted brown with flavored flour and those tail M’s

curled crisp she swirls that mess of greens to wilt

in that taste until those brookies are cooked through

but not too.

The works display a definite sense of place, from the Brooksville and Turtle Head of “Joe Dana’s Walking Stick/Because It Has Been Given” to the Flanders Bay of “Summer Woman.”

Ranzoni’s Hancock County growing up as Patricia Lorraine Smith blooms in “Making Maybaskets,” written for the 1997 centennial of the Ellsworth Public Library.

Spanning the years 1947 to 1957, the poem reveals a young girl who saw woods “rainsmocked and flocked with pollens and insect wings,” but could not imagine the area was peopled by writers such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and E.B. White.

Of course, there are people Ranzoni did know, as well – the aunts, the mother who writes poems, the father who comes home from the war and names a puppy Tojo after the Japanese prime minister.

The history of the Gray family is woven into “Oh, Letitia,” a poem about 60 women making a bicentennial quilt for Castine, and the inclusion of a swatch that was sent for the project.

Look here, Letitia – John was yours, Reuben mine. We are kin met again

on this patchwork sewing for Castine oh how to comprehend? Their presence

for better or worse knots the beginning of the English permanence

on the Penobscot.

Parts of “Another Long” seem even more personal as Ranzoni describes coping with the disabling effects of a neuromuscular disorder, dystonia.

The volume closes with the lengthy title poem, “Settling,” which reaches from the present back to 1620 and Elizabeth Hopkins, “goodwife” who gave birth on the voyage aboard the Mayflower.

The piece brings in Ranzoni’s own experience, and also pays tribute to the “First Light People” who already inhabited the country.

In general, the shorter pieces with the shorter lines are easier to absorb, but readers also will find it worth the effort to ponder the longer, more complicated works.

Ranzoni displays a fierce spirit when addressing current events, such as child abuse and the Legislature’s decision to remove the word “squaw” from state landmarks, but she truly shines when writing about the past.”Settling” is a worthy successor to her 1995 volume, “Claiming,” and to the many works she hashad included in anthologies.

Patricia Ranzoni will give a reading at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Borders Books and Music in Bangor. A collection of her May baskets and the wedding dress she made for her sister, pictured on the cover of “Settling,” are on display through May at Fogler Library, University of Maine.