Poetry review – SOME DISTANT PIN OF LIGHT: Peter Mladinic finds wonder and mystery in this collection by Francine Witte
Some Distant Pin of Light
Francine Witte
Cervena Barva Press.
$18.00 paper.
This book of poems may be a love letter to earth, water and sky. It is sometimes unsettling, sometimes reassuring. The love letter’s author, in her emotional landscape, is, herself, elemental, figuratively stripped down to her essential self. In the opening poem, she says, “…my borders are always shifting.” Words such as hunger, want, and egg reoccur in these poems, elemental words. The word you is significant; from the middle of the book, “night was always coming …you were all it needed to begin.” The book’s title – which is also its last line – connotes the idea that “some distant pin of light” is distant when it is perceived by the human eye. A path into these poems, this love letter of the human heart, may be taken by way of earth, sky, and water. As tectonic plates shift, so does the landscape of the speaker.
Earth in the book’s second poem is the mythological garden of Adam and Eve, in which the poet interjects a human element. “He didn’t need the snake to tempt you. Hunger would have done that in the end.” Often, earth and water are in the same poem. In ‘If I Turn Animal,’ the speaker says, “If I …dig my paws, really plant / them into the damp hungry soil, I might start to see the river again as / quench and cool.” Other poems evoke the mystery of “the forest night,” the marsh “Residue of breath and struggle,” sheep meadows turned into parking lots, and in ‘Other Histories,’ we learn of “the center of the earth. That history / where you held your mother’s hand / that one last time as it went weightless / with her death.” The poem ‘Speck’ comes full circle in a passage that evokes Wallace Stevens’s ‘Death is the mother of beauty.’
How we break down
speck by speck. Until death becomes our mother, birthing our bodies
into the ground, or our ashes into the sea —the sea that strokes the
shore like a hand reaching for something it once lost.
The word you is significant to the sky in ‘How the Light Hits.’ “When you were here, together we were a lightplanet. / We could fan out and shine up the street.” In ‘It is 1951,’ as the speaker imagines the moment of her own conception, there is “the bird tapping on the window” that her father doesn’t hear. Another negation is found in the storm that never comes, in ‘Shopping for the Storm.’ And in ‘Definition,’ a domestic, family poem, the sky is bright and clear, but there is also isolation and loneliness.
Then the boy asks his grandmother
what a lemon is. She is round-shouldered and pucker-skinned. She
only comes downstairs once a day. Otherwise she stays in the attic,
where she lives. A tiny window, tinier view. The sun is a lemon, she
says. Sometimes a slice, sometimes a wedge. It fits different each day in
my window she says. Each day it’s a little less yellow than it was the day
before.
Freshwater lakes and rivers coexist with saltwater between the covers of this book. ‘That Time at Coney Island’ begins “Oh, you were there. I saw you. / There was an ocean, hot dogs/ and ice cream cones. There were seagulls who only knew want.” The constant presence of the gulls contrasts with the fleeting presence of “you. Always having / to go somewhere.” There’s also the constancy of the ocean “…waves that only know how to flow oceanward.” In freshwater the hole in a husband’s leaky rowboat is likened to the hole in his and his wife’s marriage. And in ‘Even in the Shark World,’ the speaker’s father is depicted as volatile. She says, “I was never sure who he was yelling at, / the neighbors…
or the God
who my father swore was always
testing him. Either way, I wanted him
to let go, let the ocean glide him
forward, be like those sharks
who keep moving even with
speargashes in their skin.
Some Distant Point of Light is both circular and linear. It is at once local and universal in its concerns. It calls to mind Frost’s line: “earth’s the right place for loving” and is a book filled with the wonder of our being here. Witte does as well rendering the anecdote as she does evoking the light of distant dark places on earth and above, and the mysteries beyond the horizon where water meets sky. One comes away from this book feeling that what has been said could be said no other way. Francine Witte takes in all and holds nothing back, and that is to her readers’ advantage.
Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.
Jan 16 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Francine Witte
Poetry review – SOME DISTANT PIN OF LIGHT: Peter Mladinic finds wonder and mystery in this collection by Francine Witte
This book of poems may be a love letter to earth, water and sky. It is sometimes unsettling, sometimes reassuring. The love letter’s author, in her emotional landscape, is, herself, elemental, figuratively stripped down to her essential self. In the opening poem, she says, “…my borders are always shifting.” Words such as hunger, want, and egg reoccur in these poems, elemental words. The word you is significant; from the middle of the book, “night was always coming …you were all it needed to begin.” The book’s title – which is also its last line – connotes the idea that “some distant pin of light” is distant when it is perceived by the human eye. A path into these poems, this love letter of the human heart, may be taken by way of earth, sky, and water. As tectonic plates shift, so does the landscape of the speaker.
Earth in the book’s second poem is the mythological garden of Adam and Eve, in which the poet interjects a human element. “He didn’t need the snake to tempt you. Hunger would have done that in the end.” Often, earth and water are in the same poem. In ‘If I Turn Animal,’ the speaker says, “If I …dig my paws, really plant / them into the damp hungry soil, I might start to see the river again as / quench and cool.” Other poems evoke the mystery of “the forest night,” the marsh “Residue of breath and struggle,” sheep meadows turned into parking lots, and in ‘Other Histories,’ we learn of “the center of the earth. That history / where you held your mother’s hand / that one last time as it went weightless / with her death.” The poem ‘Speck’ comes full circle in a passage that evokes Wallace Stevens’s ‘Death is the mother of beauty.’
The word you is significant to the sky in ‘How the Light Hits.’ “When you were here, together we were a lightplanet. / We could fan out and shine up the street.” In ‘It is 1951,’ as the speaker imagines the moment of her own conception, there is “the bird tapping on the window” that her father doesn’t hear. Another negation is found in the storm that never comes, in ‘Shopping for the Storm.’ And in ‘Definition,’ a domestic, family poem, the sky is bright and clear, but there is also isolation and loneliness.
Freshwater lakes and rivers coexist with saltwater between the covers of this book. ‘That Time at Coney Island’ begins “Oh, you were there. I saw you. / There was an ocean, hot dogs/ and ice cream cones. There were seagulls who only knew want.” The constant presence of the gulls contrasts with the fleeting presence of “you. Always having / to go somewhere.” There’s also the constancy of the ocean “…waves that only know how to flow oceanward.” In freshwater the hole in a husband’s leaky rowboat is likened to the hole in his and his wife’s marriage. And in ‘Even in the Shark World,’ the speaker’s father is depicted as volatile. She says, “I was never sure who he was yelling at, / the neighbors…
Some Distant Point of Light is both circular and linear. It is at once local and universal in its concerns. It calls to mind Frost’s line: “earth’s the right place for loving” and is a book filled with the wonder of our being here. Witte does as well rendering the anecdote as she does evoking the light of distant dark places on earth and above, and the mysteries beyond the horizon where water meets sky. One comes away from this book feeling that what has been said could be said no other way. Francine Witte takes in all and holds nothing back, and that is to her readers’ advantage.
Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge, is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.