The Raincoat Colors by Helena Minton

In Helena Minton’s latest collection, loss looms large after the death of a father. From the last afternoon drive in “Impala,” the father is everywhere and especially in Paris, where the speaker of these poems goes after he’s gone, taking his place on a trip he’d planned. In these lyrics the poet transposes that sadness of loss with an admirable struggle to persist, the poems unfolding with exquisite imagery drawn from nature, tapping memory, and employing her acute sense of observation. She takes inspiration from artists Georgia O’Keefe and the Pacific NW painters, the latter providing her title for the collection in the poem “Interlude.” Minton is accomplished in her craft and these poems are teeming with the courage it takes to go on living, engaging with a world beyond one’s own grief.
–Mary Bonina, author of Clear Eye Tea, Poems and My Father’s Eyes: A Memoir

Helena Minton’s poems capture the essence of life as she ponders the quiet dramas of one generation replacing another, her return to childhood haunts in Paris after a death, and the passage of time as “First dreams don’t always come true/and second, subsequent dreams,/ what becomes of them?” Like a collector making sense of “countless things,” Minton draws our attention, through metaphors of art and nature, to a series of likenesses that otherwise can’t be named. The Raincoat Colors brilliantly illuminates the off-kilter, the austere, and the mysterious, always-surprising elements of an ever-changing world.

–Joyce Peseroff, author of  Know Thyself and Eastern Mountain Time

Review of the chapbook, “The Raincoat Colors,” written by Kathleen Aguero for Solstice, A Magazine of Diverse Voices.