Book Review: Permanent Change of Station

It starts with the cover.

A sweet little girl, lost in thought with her faithful ‘Wizard of Oz’ terrier, evokes ‘there’s no place like home”. This beautiful scene is above a harsh photo of a humvee in an angry and dangerous desert a world away.

This juxtaposition between what we want and what we have is the crux of the human condition. We want serenity but instead battle disruption.

Permanent Change of Station, the newest book of poetry by Lisa Stice, provides the voice of what we want versus what we have.

My favorite is this one sentence poem:

Fix, Mommy

Some things never go

back to the way they were.

I read this as - Fix Mommy. As a mom, I often feel broken. This poem made me remember when my daughter used to ask me to fix something, and I easily could. She’s a difficult teen now, and it breaks me when I can’t fix her problems anymore. I wish we could go back to the way things were, when all it took was a kiss and maybe an ice cream cone to make her troubles melt away.

In View from My Kitchen Window, Stice admires, (maybe a little jealously) a showy red cardinal outside her kitchen. She wishes she could move her family as easily as a bird…lifting her family from one place to another, and be ‘lightweight’ with no ‘baggage or belongings’.

I also liked the poem, Fifth Choice. Do we get what we deserve? Would I want what I deserve? Sometimes I deserve a pie in the face. Sometimes I deserve scorn. Sometimes I deserve love. What do we really deserve?

In, The Dog Dreams, the poet comforts a sleeping dog. I’ve watched my dog sleeping, then twitch, and make weak running motions. I wonder what is going on in my dog’s head. Same as mine? Stice then reassures us, and her dog, to come home and stay, because the sun is shining here.

There is sometimes a funny disconnect between men and women, and the poem, Another Disappointment exploits it. Did the woman want the foxglove flower, but he brought home the brand of motor cross gloves instead? Or perhaps she wanted luxurious leather gloves trimmed with fox fur, but gave her a planter of foxgloves?

Who knows.

That’s the wonderful thing about this collection of poetry. The reader can take the poems to explore the feelings they have in their own lives. And hopefully, that will lead us all to a little more serenity.

Permanent Change of Station is available Amazon and other booksellers worldwide as well as her first poetry collection, Uniform.