In a house, one can walk into each room and feel completely different. Still, there is an essence that floats within these spaces — an essence that is both familiar and different, at times shared yet always personal — this is home. And like those rooms are the poems found in Andréa Suarez Hill’s latest collection, A Portrait to Paint.

This is an expansive collection — 62 pieces in all — of finely tuned eloquence packaged and held together by emotive strands of revelation.

The collection is arranged in three sections, the universal or WE, the shared YOU and the most personal of the bunch, the singular ME. These are the “rooms” a reader will explore and no doubt be touched by.

Suarez Hill grew up in New England. She moved to Maine in 1987 after having a career in print, broadcast and photojournalism. She and her husband live on the saltwater farm they created together in Jonesboro. She is also the author of the poetry collection titled The Making of Budworm Farm, and her work has also appeared in poetry anthologies.

In the first section, Hill moves through the outer rooms of WE as humanity. Mankind is dealing with life as it happens: climate change, politics, societal injustice and a pandemic.

In the opening piece, “Tikkun Olam,” Hebrew meaning “repairing the world,” Hill strikes a nerve, bringing the brutal reality that is a pandemic. She lays the ghost bare for all to see and, in a sense, allows the healing to begin, to wrap its arms around us all.

“a blue sky river runs

between the trees above me,

arcing in easterlies that

hum through them and

cut a path that sounds like grief,

a human current”

The second section, YOU, is about relationships, whether those of people, place or animal. Hill conjures the deep-seated emotional ties that bind us as humans to something other than our self and in doing so makes us realize it is our relationships that make us better humans. This is her homage to the past and present.

In “Lesson,” Hill captures in metaphorical brilliance our need to slow it down, listen, give and most importantly receive the moment. She reflects all of this from atop her horse on a ride that is, for her, forever.

“Feel what I say.

Forget self, give.

Be generous with

Hands, reins, reward.

Every

Ride is a refuge,

Within is without.

When you listen,

questions are answered.”

And in the final section, ME, Hill shares pure thought and emotion with every word placed down on the page. Her thumbprint presses down, revealing the wonder in both nature and in her memories as a child, a family member and as a friend.

In “Rebirth,” I believe Hill summates the wonder of her life amidst loss and captures that essence that floats within all of the rooms that is her world, that is her home.

“A rose glow opens the eastern sky, Hues from sacred worlds bloom, a Persian pastel palette, saffron, alabaster, lazuline blue, Titian’s and Tintoretto’s tools…

my shadow lies long, together we step to the barn as wet grain mash, warm water and breath steam in the nether space between dawn and day more a feeling than a being…

morning sounds in silence, trees crack, snow crunches beneath equine feet, geese honk in coves below, the clatter of deer hooves on iced ground when they scatter…

nature is a painter who makes music, her aura eclipses humanity. I sense a voice say ‘amen’ to bless the moment, bear witness to her beauty and awake my heart.”

In this collection one will find something to touch the heart, to converse with sometimes intellectually often emotionally and to listen to attentively when the words are spoken, perhaps even to help mitigate or understand better societal imperfection and its lasting impact on life today. This is poetry that is personal and necessary.

That is what poetry sometimes must be — a woven tapestry of necessary conversations coming from all the rooms of a world, horrid, beautiful and resilient. All of it here in this collection sweeps us to a better understanding, a better place, if but for a moment. This is confident writing from a gifted writer and poet.

© 2023 RJ Heller

Austin Macauley Publishers, 2023, softcover $9.95

First published in The Quoddy Tides, Eastport, Maine: September 22, 2023