{"id":303,"date":"2014-12-16T22:43:03","date_gmt":"2014-12-17T03:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=303"},"modified":"2014-12-16T22:47:11","modified_gmt":"2014-12-17T03:47:11","slug":"review-of-beauty-mark-by-suzanne-cleary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Review of Beauty Mark by Suzanne Cleary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cleary<\/a>Suzanne Cleary. Beauty Mark. <\/em>BkMk Press, 2013. 95 pgs. $13.95.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lynn Domina<\/p>\n

Beauty Mark, <\/em>Suzanne Cleary\u2019s third collection and winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, is an ambitious and dynamic response to popular culture. The speaker seems to address the reader directly if not exactly intimately, the way extraverts comment their way through encounters, entertaining their companions with energetic observation. Cleary\u2019s close consideration of the ordinary leads her to metaphor, even to the transcendent, yet the shift from concrete to abstract, from literal to figurative, is subtle. The world of the figurative is as attractive as the world of the literal.<\/p>\n

For example, \u201cTemporary Tattoo\u201d opens with the speaker in a bookstore noticing a \u201cbowl of what seem to be postage stamps\u201d though they are, of course, temporary tattoos. What follows is a riff on impermanence, for tattoos are meant to mark our bodies permanently:<\/p>\n

\u2026A tattoo should be permanent,<\/p>\n

a commitment, a cross-hatched cobra coiled
\naround the biceps, inks of deep blue and green
\nlike the veins that pop from the carney\u2019s arm<\/p>\n

when he makes a fist. A tattoo should not
\nsmear, dissolve with baby-oil-on-tissue,
\nshould be bold as a snake swallowing a mouse<\/p>\n

and the mouse-shape traveling the length of it
\nlike a bad idea shaping a life, distorting a life.<\/p>\n

Here we have simile (like a bad idea) embedded in simile (bold as a snake swallowing a mouse), preceded by an additional simile (like the veins that pop)\u2014yet the imagery remains clear, easy to follow, and compelling\u2014for who among us can turn our eyes from that bulge inching through the snake? The poem then returns to the tattoo, of an apple:<\/p>\n

\u2026pink-red, like the tip of a cigarette,<\/p>\n

its single leaf the green of the 1964 Chevy convertible
\non cinder blocks behind the bookstore,
\na car that will never run<\/p>\n

despite the young man who works
\nunder the hood every night until dark.<\/p>\n

Readers might, at this point, have begun to wonder whether these images are simply associative details, interesting as they might be\u2014but where\u2019s the point? The point is the nature of impermanence, the idea to which we\u2019re about to return, as the poem begins to address the young man who stands for us all. \u201cSomeone\u201d ought to give this young man a piece of good advice: \u201cTell him the Chevy\u2019s time \/ has come and gone, that nothing lasts forever \/ except our desire for things to last forever.\u201d Temporary tattoos don\u2019t last, of course, and neither does a Chevy. Nor the mouse, nor the snake that eats the mouse. Nor do we, which the poem avoids stating directly, turning against itself instead as it concludes: \u201cin the gravel lot behind the bookstore \/ the last of the sun shines \/ pink, and everywhere, and always.\u201d Do we believe it? Not literally, but we recognize our desire to believe it. With this last line, the poem circles back upon itself, the pink of the sun reminiscent of the red of the apple on the temporary tattoo with which we began, confirming our suspicion that the final assertion of permanence is more hope than fact.<\/p>\n

\u201cTemporary Tattoo\u201d is composed in tercets, the lines fairly evenly divided between end-stopped and enjambed. Many of the poems in Beauty Mark <\/em>are composed in regular stanzas, tercets mostly with occasional quatrains and couplets. Several poems consist of one long stanza, but even in these, Cleary often indents alternating lines, the extra space suggesting a subtle break. The lines are generally long, sometimes fourteen or eighteen syllables, so the rush of the lines is balanced by the regularity of the stanzas. The poems demonstrate both exuberance and restraint\u2014though it is the exuberance, I suspect, that most readers will remember.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the Story Came Down to Me\u201d illustrates Cleary\u2019s poetic strategy as well as her manner of thinking. The poem opens with an odd family detail: \u201cMy grandmother was arrested \/ nearly, for driving with too many saints on her dashboard.\u201d The speaker describes the police officer, the car, the \u201cnine plaster statues.\u201d Exactly two-thirds of the way through, the poem turns, in the manner of a sonnet, to the speaker-poet\u2019s composition. The speaker confesses that she has \u201clied in saying it was my grandmother, \/ although I did in fact see an old woman \/ driving a dark blue Chevy with saints.\u201d And she\u2019s lied about the police officer and the number of statues. As poets know, few of the details in our poems are factual, and yet our poems are still true, and we write them to understand how we perceive truth, as Cleary states so movingly in this poem\u2019s last lines: \u201cI swear the short white-haired woman \/ peering through the space between Joseph and Mary, \/ I swear it brought tears to my eyes, \/ and I am still trying to figure out how.\u201d This poem illustrates the argument writers often make, that sometimes you need to invent in order to tell the truth. Whether or not we agree with that argument, we respond to the poem.<\/p>\n

Beauty Mark <\/em>is more playful than many of the collections I\u2019ve read during the last couple of years. Even the titles of many of the individual poems are playful: \u201cC\u00e9zanne\u2019s Clogs,\u201d \u201cGod Visits the Televangelists,\u201d \u201cImagining the Shaker Meeting at Which the Founder Ann Lee Announces the Policy of Sexual Abstinence.\u201d The titles made me want to read, and the poems made me want to keep reading. I did, and I\u2019m glad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suzanne Cleary. Beauty Mark. BkMk Press, 2013. 95 pgs. $13.95. Reviewed by Lynn Domina Beauty Mark, Suzanne Cleary\u2019s third collection and winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, is an ambitious and dynamic response to popular culture. The speaker seems to address the reader directly if not exactly intimately, the way extraverts comment their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}