Whisperspeak

According to Judy Duval, her first book of poetry is "a dream come true." Whisperspeak - A Collection of Poetry materialized over decades from the hundreds of poems the poet scribbled on small, colored sticky notes, envelopes, napkins, or sometimes typed neatly on her old Altair computer. Tucking them away one by one in a shoe box that she kept hidden in her closet, her imagistic, poignant poems are snapshots from her life. In the first  poem of the collection, "The Puzzle, " we watch as the speaker is unsuccessful in her struggle to complete an old jigsaw puzzle she has taken down from a shelf. In  "Mrs.
Fiske, " a poem recounting an incident the poet and her sister observed while growing up, we feel the speaker's outrage at a neighborhood injustice.  And with the poem "The Red Toothbrush, " Judy Duval reminds us that throughout a life as a daughter, sister, friend, wife, mother, and grandmother, a woman learns that sometimes loss is so great,  "such a personal thing... I still can't throw / the red toothbrush away." The Epigraph at the beginning of Whisperspeak is fitting: "Word by word, the language of women so often begins with a whisper."From When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice  by Terry Tempest Williams