Book Review: Splendor by Emily Bludworth de Barrios

Splendor
Poems by Emily Bludworth de Barrios
H_NGM_N Books, March 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0990308225
$15.95, 104pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel

In Splendor—Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s debut poetry collection—the spare, fragmentary, and often cyclical lyric dominates the internal struggles of a speaker who has to confront the gulf between privilege and necessity. With poem titles that often act as elaborate prefaces to the speaker’s mental state, and finely wrought couplets in short, direct lines that tend to recursively loop words and language, Splendor lends itself well to a self who is self-critical and yet self-forgiving. In its summation, this collection offers a taste of a biting human psyche.

The opening poem, “May the saints guard thee,” sparks a trend of revelations and negations:

There are effortless persons,
and you are not one of them.

Hush, hush.
Things will not be the same.

The speaker’s direct and brutal honesty continues to permeate the collection. In “I would pray to heaven to clear up your uncharitable surmises,” the speaker abruptly informs the reader “I always knew I would / marry a rich man. // You think I joking.” Further breaking down any preconceived notion, the speaker elaborates, “I live in a fantasy land / and nothing is this simple.” This seemingly straightforward confession comes as shocking (and unapologetic).

Harbored within that confessional notion is nostalgia. “and now with more serenity” pushes away from these thoughts and hovers in the physical, everyday world. The speaker yearns for a busy time when people would “Make a mayonnaise sandwich and / fetch the water jar” and when there was “No space for a full evening of self-doubt.” With all of the time and luxuries provided, this speaker desires a chance to escape from the self.

The insistence to march ahead and continue living, whether in internal turmoil or physical toil, is what keeps these poems so appealing—after all, in “We are all reptiles, miserable, sinful creatures,” the speaker observes “It is therefore necessary / to dissolve the knowledge of your failures.” In Splendor, Amidst the physical sensations of living, there is always the oscillation of existence, a change altogether sudden, immediate, and yet recurring in the ever-distant past.

Alyse Bensel is the author of the chapbooks Not of Their Own Making (dancing girl press, 2014) and Shift (Plan B Press, 2012). Her poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Menacing Hedge, Heron Tree, and burntdistrict, among others. She serves as the Book Reviews Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Managing Editor of Beecher’s.