Book Review: Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse

Reviewed by Pedro Ponce

Still Life with Poem: Contemporary Natures Mortes in Verse
A poetry anthology edited by Jehanne Dubrow and Lindsay Lusby
Literary House Press, October 2016
$20.00; 174 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0937692233

Artists and art historians notwithstanding, it’s the rare visitor who includes still lifes on their museum must-see list. The classics by Michelangelo, Munch, and company familiar from undergraduate survey slides or souvenir mugs and tote bags are the star attractions; the still life by comparison feels like bonus, behind-the-scenes footage padding out the collector’s edition. The inanimate subject matter can often feel preparatory to something bigger.

Perhaps this is why, in her introduction to Still Life with Poem, co-editor Jehanne Dubrow seems at pains to emphasize the dynamism of the genre’s tradition “as a vehicle for symbolism and metaphor, objects serving as stand-ins for philosophical ideas, religious principles, or moralizing messages.” Likewise, in creative writing, “concrete, tangible things are used to express abstract concepts by evoking the five senses.” The poets featured in this genre-spanning volume were asked to respond to original still lifes of their own creation, whether real or imagined.

Among the editors’ most evocative selections is “Still Life with Small Objects of Perfect Choking Size.” The parental speaker in Keetje Kuipers’ poem contemplates all the things a child can choke on:

Nothing so obvious as a gumball,
a coin. Instead, the cap

to the chapstick, or, somehow,
the moon: Lips parted, tongue

still, the tiny blackness
of her mouth’s small pit

just large enough to slip
that lunar white marble inside—

The conceit’s morbid humor gives way to grief as the speaker discerns the fragile line separating love from loss: “Why does she want to take / herself from me?”

Kuipers’ is a subtle allusion to the still life as vanitas, a tableau of objects such as rotting fruit or dying flowers that represent earthly transience. Amy Newman channels this tradition formally in her villanelle “Vanitas”:

Real life is never free from imperfection.
The stillness of a still life is a ploy,
God. Even knowing this is not protection.

Newman dismisses the vanity of Photoshop and autosave for preserving our experiences. Nevertheless

                                         I need these decoys.
Real life is never free from imperfection.
God even knowing this is not protection.

The concluding quatrain recalls the central role of juxtaposition in both still life and poem, disparate images and ideas galvanized by their unexpected proximity. Sandra Beasley creates similar effects in “Still Life with Sex,” which begins with foreplay courtesy of “a skull grinning / amongst the grapes.”

Some selections approach their tableaux as concentrated narratives, unpacked line by line. Gregory Fraser assesses the effects of time and disaster on a married couple in “I Am Too Wise Of Course.” As one spouse cooks eggs, the scholarly voice wistfully remembers “us / at the start, in the only city, only days / after the attacks.” Paisley Rekdal’s “My Father’s Hummingbirds” juxtaposes a father’s racism—

                                       this man who keeps
The Bell Curve tucked on a shelf from which
he once read me excerpts over the phone
to prove what he calls my mother’s

“Asian intelligence.”

—with his tenderness towards the natural world:

                                                                 In his letter,
he describes the bird’s intransigence, her insistence
she build her nest—no bigger
than a wild strawberry, he notes—on a twig
sheltered by a single leaf.

“The great risk of Still Life with Poem,” writes Dubrow in her introduction, “was that we would gather together texts crowded as tables at a yard sale, crammed with tchotchkes, bric-a-brac, knickknacks gathering dust.” The art historian Norman Bryson addresses this concern in Dubrow’s introduction when he describes still life as “the world minus its capacity for generating narrative interest.” Yet, while exceptions are few, there is certainly more that narrative can learn from the art of stillness. The popularity of very short or “flash” fiction, for instance, is altering how readers and writers think about narrative, the compression of character, place, and time intensifying texture through the friction of conventionally static episodes. Dubrow herself demonstrates the fertile potential of this risk in “A Catalogue of the Contents of His Nightstand”:

One orphaned oak leaf from his uniform.
Loose change. A pair of collar stays. A tube
of mentholated chapstick going warm.
An accordion of ancient Trojans, lube
that’s meant to tingle when it touches skin.

Far from “knickknacks gathering dust,” the listed objects create narrative urgency, a concentrated effort to reconstruct what is gone (“A tiny light / he aimed at shadows as we lay in bed / (bright spheres) until the battery went dead”) using what remains. Not to mention, if Kuipers and Dubrow’s contributions are any indication, some subtle product placement.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its prosaic subject matter, Still Life with Poem engages most when form and content gesture toward the edges of perception and experience. Carrie Jerrell sees the possibility of divine intervention in a cluster of abandoned crutches in “Prayer Room with Crutches, El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico.” “I vow to listen harder,” says the speaker. “I kneel to run my hands through the holy dirt. / I don’t know which wound to rub it in first.” In “Still Life with Wasp Nest,” Chad Davidson reveals the grotesque symbiosis at the heart of everyday existence,

            this nest built from devoured wood
most likely from our deck, from the essence

of our leisure, regurgitated pulp
forming this miracle, this papier-mȃché
musée amid our midsummer cocktail

Still Life with Poem straddles genres, themes, and art forms in its eclectic explorations of the ordinary. If stillness is a challenge for the contemporary reader, co-editors Dubrow and Lusby admirably demonstrate that this is a risk worth taking.

Pedro Ponce teaches writing and theory at St. Lawrence University. His novel Dreamland is forthcoming from Satellite Press.