The Stunned Buzz of Resurrection
September 1, 2009, 8:23 am
"Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most
difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a
heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be
a true poet. The last is essential."
Wassily Kandinsky.
It may seem a little odd to begin a review of
poetry with a quote about artists, but the Snell sisters don't make
such distinctions easy. While each is pledged to keep her own internal
boundaries, so that Janet's pictures are not a direct expression of
Cheryl's poems, but rather conjure the atmosphere of them, it is plain
that both are consummate artists, one with well-honed quill, one with
psychogenic brush.
The 'heightened sensitivity for composition and for
colors' applies equally to 'true poet', Cheryl. Her verses are a riot
of color, sometimes named colors from the palette. She speaks of 'blue
irony' and 'the indigo moments before bed' and 'alizarin, vermilion,
cadmium, red wings beating everywhere at once'. Those who paint, or
spend a lot of time in galleries, know how shades of red vibrate and
redefine a whole canvas. Then there are the subtler hues, as in the
gentle poem, Aura.
Small galoshes
fracture the rainbow
in a puddle.
A spray of seven colors
prisms the sky.
It falls back to earth,
trailing iridescence
around a thin yellow foot
it mistakes for the sun.
Cheryl's mastery of language is breathtaking, her
phrases turned with lancet-precision. The montaging of constrasted
images taps deep into the soul and releases elusive truths with the
chaste simplicity of oxygen bubbles rising to the surface of a lake.
You can feel at one with the unfurling torsion of spring, its sinews
newly braced, in Poem With Spring Fever, opening you up to growing possibilities beneath a benevolent sky.
The perspectives range from under-your-nose through
middle distance to wide blue yonder, with close-up shots that refuse to
freeze and leave you on the crest of longing. A broken spider's web is
'a ruination of silk geometries' while 'In the stunned hush of its own
snapped strands, the spider writhes and rolls in a ransom of insects.' Hope describes 'how the glazed sky hurled through will feathers will sometimes part like water for one bird.'
And who, in love, has never been poised on this precipice described in Closer?
Crisscrossed nerves
vibrate like colours on a map.
My senses are a balcony
overhanging the sea's dark watch,
its cosntant ticking. I wait,
a flicker of light upon the spine,
from my high place.
The rooms sway, and I know you
are near, the train pulling
into the station,
quick bound
down the escalator,
eyes on the door,
its hinged footing,
your hand opening the cab's yellow
roaring
into the rush-hour surge.
This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance.
Memento Mori is a tour de force.
I cannot praise it enough and feel privileged to have had the chance to
review such a gem. The book is well-produced and does credit to poet
and painter on every level. Janet Snell's expressionist art - vaguely
reminiscent of Edvard Munch but intensely unique - broods over these
pieces, depicting shape and shadow from the hazy layers of the
subconscious. These presences shifting through space are the masks we
tow our troubled worlds behind.
If the title suggests that Wordsworth's Intimations of Immortality has
been turned on its head, then it would certainly be misleading. This
book is life-affirming to a degree and proves the paradox that there is
still life beyond the barbed reminders of human transience.
RJC
Rosy Cole
http://www.redroom.com/blog/rosy-cole/the-stunned-buzz-resurrection