rev. of Farewell, My Lovelies by Diann Blakely
by
Farewell, My Lovelies
Poems by Diann Blakely. Story Line Press, $12.95 paper. Reviewed by Denise Duhamel.
In her second book, Farewell, My Lovelies, Diann Blakely evokes Raymond Chandler's yin and writes a decidedly female poetry -- tough, stylized, and heart-smart. In the opening poem of the collection, "Last Dance," the speaker observes a gaggle of young Courtney Love fans who, during an intermission of a ballet, proclaim the performance "a fucking A-1 bore." Right away, you know whose side Blakely is on. Although her poetry does have the formal precision and grace associated with ballet, it also, more remarkably, has the roar and feistiness of a Hole concert. The girls in "baby doll dresses, worn with fishnets" are not unlike Blakely's own poems-wide-eyed, sexy, and provocative.
When Blakely spins narratives about adultery -- "hashed-lace brownies with rum-&-Tabs"; " 'projects,' as if someone had made them for school' "; Ted Hughes "so handsome on TV [her] knees water"; and a girl "raped in the snowbound northwest / By six grunge-clad assaulters who crooned Nirvana's / Early hit 'Polly' " -- the reader is with her. Blakely's storytelling is complex, no-nonsense, and often full of pain. Her voice is an in-your-face voice, an almost performance-poetry voice, yet her poems are full of craft and gorgeousness.
In the loosely constructed pantoum "Reunion Banquet, Class of '79," Blakely deftly weaves the movies
Farewell, My Lovely, Klute, Chinatown, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Helter Skelter, and half a dozen other films with the semi-tragic lives of college friends who are single moms and who are miscarrying, snorting coke, recovering from abuse. In this remarkable poem about female friendship, a "virgin" is someone who has not had a divorce.
The final poem, "Chorale," also combines several narratives: the story of a friend's illness, historical anecdotes about diabetes, Schiller, and Beethoven. Blakely's leaps from topic to topic are genius, going from "when her lover went back home to his wife, my friend / skipped one shot, two, skipped meals" to "even out [her] bedroom / we smelled the perfume of-roses? / No, fruity and cloying, / like a sack of apples / left to rot," looping back to "our unrequitable ache to drown in sweetness."
Many of the poems in
Farewell, My Lovelies deal with crime. In "Christmas Call," the speaker receives an eerie call from a grown woman who simply says "Mama" over and over. The speaker imagines: "a door locked / or a closet gone into, her voice muffled / by coats and stacked boxes, a husband / / with fists cocked outside . . ." Before the caller loses her connection, Blakely writes, "I pleaded with her, call police / or priest." And in the most disturbing poem in the book, another pantoum, "Story Hour," the speaker returns to the library parking lot daily, looking for a man who flirted with her there, even though a local rapist is on the loose: "A rapist, / or a prince, who might return with a kiss?" And then, "I'm wearing red lipstick, which I don't at home. / Catch me, catch me if you can, beneath twilit skies."
Denise Duhamel's Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems
is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2001. Her other titles include The Star-Spangled Banner, Oyl
(with Maureen Seaton), and Kinky.
She is an assistant professor at Florida International University in Miami.