The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire by Daisy Fried Review by Roy White

The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire by Daisy Fried

Review by Roy White

Published 2022 by Flood Editions

ISBN 978-1-7332734-8-0

Helicopters sang out in the South Philly sky
And morning wind blew branches against our windows.
…
Someone danced on a police car.
Someone blew up an ATM and his hand off with it.

………………………….(“Daybreak”)

In Daisy Fried’s The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire, the splenetic 1850s Paris of Les Fleurs du mal is translated or transmuted into the “angry Philly” of the plague year 2020. Fried expresses the fear and isolation of the pandemic and the anguish of police killings and their aftermath, but most poignantly she writes about the personal ordeal of watching her husband’s mind and body disintegrate in his last year, and of trying to care for him without adequate resources.

Some of the poems here are more or less translations, in which Fried acts, to quote “Reader,” as Baudelaire’s “doppelganger sister.” In others, the older poet is seen only in vague outline, like a small mammal eaten by a python. “Baudelaire’s Paysage,” as Fried notes in her preface, already sounds in its original form like a poem about social distancing and social unrest:

I’ll close curtains and blinds
And build my fairy palaces in the night.
…
When Riot storms impotent at my window,
I won’t get up from my desk,

The most obvious change in her version is the replacement of Baudelaire’s rhymed stanzas with free verse, mostly in four- and five-beat lines. Fried writes that she “didn’t stress about meter,” testing the reader’s tolerance for puns.

At the other extreme is “Dr. No,” a nightmarish vignette in which an insurance company physician denies Daisy’s request for help taking care of her dying husband (I am calling the speaker Daisy, as distinct from the poet Fried). Baudelaire’s “Le Jeu,” where prostitutes lounge in a gambling den, seems very distant indeed, but what Fried carries across this distance is much more than a few details like Dr. No’s earrings (“small baubles clicking / from her lobes”). 

There is the atmosphere of claustrophobic despair, the squalor of the Paris underworld translated into the bad ventilation and industrial carpet of a corporate meeting room. And though Fried says, downplaying her poem’s connection to “Le Jeu,” that Baudelaire admires the women he calls “old whores” (vieilles putains), his speaker expresses horror as well as envy of their dreary cheerfulness and their commitment to selling themselves in any way they can. It’s not hard to see why this description summoned to the modern poet’s mind the image of a slick flack for the health-insurance death-star.

The inversion of gender is a simple device, but Fried uses it to startling effect, subverting Baudelaire’s rather shopworn catalogue of hookers and madonnas, sex kittens and succubi. In “Jewels,” the bangles and bracelets of the French poet’s girlfriend are replaced by the “family jewels” of Daisy’s amour. He dances naked “So that I may in beguiled fury adore / His whole body, paunch and luster.” This is a fresh twist, and may even be a bit unnerving to paunchy middle-aged men unused to being the target of the hungry female gaze.

In her witty preface, Fried writes that “Baudelaire let me say things I wouldn’t normally say, in ways I can’t imagine writing in my own poems.” Perhaps the project freed her to use a kind of poetic diction alien to her other work (her allegiances lie more with William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Hara than with any rhymester); the phrases “summer’s limpid light” (“Autumn Song”) and “magnificent mirrors, beveled / and chamfered” (Invitation in Hospice”) come to mind. At times she allows herself a straightforward gorgeousness of style, as in “Baudelaire’s Paysage”:

Prising sunshine from my heart, making
Of my burning thoughts a gentler weather.

The Year the City Emptied also evokes emotion more directly, with less pervasive irony, than Fried’s last collection, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice. This is most evident when she pushes off from Baudelaire and addresses her husband. In “Daybreak,” people languishing in nursing homes are “abandoned / as I sometimes wish to abandon you.” In “Correspondences,” Baudelaire’s impersonal assertions (“There exist perfumes tender as infant flesh…”) are infused with affection and elegy: “So your smells, colors, the sounds you made— / I remember them.”

The sensual, richly patterned “Invitation au voyage”, the most famous of the Fleurs du mal, or maybe only my favorite, is re-oriented here with just a tweak of the title, “Invitation in Hospice.” CB’s fantasy of luxury travel with the beloved becomes the dream of a more profound release, though it should be said that, given Baudelaire’s struggles with syphilis and the poor health of his on-again, off-again partner Jeanne Duval, the two dreams may have more in common than meets the eye. Fried again places the couple at the center; where Baudelaire’s furniture speaks to the soul in its sweet native tongue, in her version “everything speaks / in our sweet secret tongue” (italics mine). 

As averse to static forms as Baudelaire is fond of them, Fried alters the poem’s refrain with each return, even inserting a curt “etc.” to shorten the second instance to “Order, calm, etc. Your body.” But she adds the key word “forever” to the third and last, making it a moving, stately farewell:

There forever, voluptuous calm,
Order, beauty.

Roy White is a blind person who lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His work has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere, and he can be found on Twitter at @surrealroy.

Daisy Fried is the author of three books of poetry: Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), named by Library Journal one of the five best poetry books of 2013,  My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, (University of Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. For her poetry, she’s received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Recent poems have been published in the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry 2013. She reviews books of poetry for The New York Times, Poetry and the Threepenny Review, and won the Editors Award from Poetry for “Sing, God-Awful Muse,” an essay about reading Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. She is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

19 October 2022