Blue Rose. Carol Muske-Dukes. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2018. 80 pages. $18.00.
In Blue Rose, her ninth book of poems, Carol Muske-Dukes writes, “I am near the end of my life, about to swallow / the last poison, the end of the end. Forget the / melodrama.” The self-effacing wit of the final fragment establishes intimacy with the reader while demonstrating the poet’s willingness to challenge whatever assertion is put forth, even if it be her own. “The end of the end” points to a crucial aspect of Blue Rose, its retrospective stance. Though poems here take on issues that define the last half-century of American political life—racism, gun violence, climate change—the collection resides in a deeply personal place, reaching back to the poet’s childhood and ahead to the recent death of her mother, exploring defining moments of pain and epiphany. Simone de Beauvoir said that for women, the body “is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view toward the world.” Crucial poems in Blue Rose take on Beauvoir’s essentially corporeal angle of vision. The body, including the material body of our suffering earth, becomes the ground of poem-making.
The title poem, which opens Blue Rose, plunges in, describing the birth of the poet’s daughter under emergency conditions:
. . . Entering light, she was
danger blue, yet to me her color appeared
something never imagined: if-flower of myth,
bloom on the isle of the color-blind, far
from our spectrum. . . .
In her notes, Muske-Dukes reminds us that the blue rose is a symbol used in Romantic literature and philosophy. Here, Muske-Dukes literalizes the symbol. The botanically impossible “if flower” (roses don’t produce the chemical for blueness) is realized in the daughter’s oxygen-deprived body, her eyelids “bruised as new petals.” The infant’s alien beauty and physical vulnerability is the first image of a series that recur in Blue Rose, showing female bodies in extremis: abused, transformed, empowered. In “Kashmir: Hindu Doctor,” for example, an MD sees her female patients in spite of threats from the patients’ husbands, who stand outside the clinic, raging at the fact “their wives / would stand naked in her gaze.” In “Weil,” the French philosopher sees in her fellow factory workers “the place within the body / where shame arrests lamentation—her gaze on an old woman’s / hands or “weariness . . . in the set of a mouth.” Cultural expectations around female beauty lead to more subtle forms of physical oppression. A poem on the contemporary scourge of eating disorders, “Failure to Thrive,” ends with the terse assessment, “Some of us must starve in order to be seen,” the alliteration—“starve,” “seen”—giving the line its visceral punch.
In other poems, women—particularly women artists—find the female body a source of culture-shifting vision and personal power. Forced to give birth while “drenched . . . shackled to a steel bed,” one of Muske-Dukes’s writing students at New York’s Women’s House of Detention makes from that experience a searing poem. The German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker depicts women in poses that defy the usual virginal or sexualized portrayals of the Western tradition; she does so defiantly, “shaking shame from her brush.” In a tribute to Adrienne Rich, Muske-Dukes quotes the late poet’s resonant lines: “I live now not as a leap / but a succession of brief amazing movements / each one making possible the next.” Years later, Muske-Dukes watches as Rich—elderly, walking with a cane, but refusing assistance—makes her way up an icy hill, “urging herself on, as in the poem. Step after step, forward and up. . . . ” Rich’s art merges with her gait; she literally em-bodies her lines, step by syllable. It’s a startling and memorable image of the poem-made-flesh.
A pair of autobiographical poems appear back-to-back in Blue Rose, both set in the late sixties and early seventies, when the sexual revolution seemed to liberate a new generation from conventional gender roles. In “Audition,” the poet is a college student living in Paris who tries for a part in the Parisian production of Hair, the rock musical famous for its all-cast nude scene. Early on in the poem, Muske-Dukes presents her twenty-something self with droll humor. A “Metro creep” who touches her leg pauses to correct Muske-Dukes’s “textbook ‘Va t’on!’” In Paris, even the pervs don’t tolerate bad grammar! But midway through “Audition,” the tone shifts:
The only time I took my clothes off at the nude scene,
Act I’s end: they hid my tie-dyed jeans. I couldn’t be
naked the way they were. I think everything is real.
Is “Audition” playing out the tension between a Continental ease with bodily matters and an American, Puritanical shame? Repeating the crucial line, Muske-Dukes raises the stakes: “Everything / was real to me, even the ongoing joke war over a woman’s body.” The cast members’ essential cruelty reminds us that the idealism of the sixties was, for many, a matter of style, not substance. As Muske-Dukes exits stage, she prophesizes that “it will all come down— / in a future when She, Great Moon, rises up, floods the Seventh / House. . . .” Co-opting the words of Hair’s iconic theme song, the young poet projects a feminist revisioning of “The Age of Aquarious.”
“Audition” is followed by “The Year the Law Changed,” which describes an abortion in the year of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized the procedure. Janitors mop the hallways of a clinic, shouting “Murderers” at women who wait to have their now-legal abortions. Afterwards, the poet then “knew”
I had my life back but covered myself with blood—
mine and some not—but still of me. I don’t know
what I mean by “of me,” it’s undefined & even
the shouting accusers won’t cross that line.
“I don’t know /what I mean by ‘of me’”: the confusion of pronouns powerfully conjures the existential crises many women face around issues of reproduction and fertility. What realm of experience more intimately illustrates Beauvoir’s conflation of bodily experience with a “point of view” toward self and world? It’s hard to read “The Year” without thinking of our current political debate about reproductive rights, the thinness of its bumper-sticker moralizing.
In the final section of Blue Rose, Muske-Dukes takes on climate change. The mood here is subjunctive; the poems are filled with unanswerable questions. The imagery is at times graphic. In “Wildfire Moon (Summer, L.A. 2016),” a child’s finger-painting of a wildfire depicts how “faces break up into / blood shards.” Other poems reflect on the urgent role science plays in our human response to the climate crisis. In “The Link,” the poet’s nine-year-old daughter immerses a white rose in blue dye, an experiment in osmosis that leads to broader understandings: “Science . . . goes on / extrapolating from the rose to the alveoli connected to / the linked chain of being.” The oxygen sacs in human lungs are part and parcel of nature; our Beauvoirian “point of view toward the world” must expand to include the earth itself if our species is to survive.
In “Microscope,” the final poem of Blue Rose, the poet’s daughter has become a research biologist—this, in spite of the fact, Muske-Dukes notes drily, that “. . . they used to joke that / female smarts leaped, ‘scatterbrained.’” Looking down her microscope, the daughter searches for the “nano-narrative,” her micro-subjects making an “alphabet”: she’s a poet of the subatomic. Near the end of “Microscope,” Muske-Dukes voices the necessity of art ceding ground to science: “. . . what do I know of these ripping souls / of elements, stripped to atomic ash on this ash planet, / this animate dust?” Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—the poet echoes the language of Genesis, her lyrical question conjuring one last image of our human body-hood. We know Muske-Dukes is right—poems can’t suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But in these lines, as throughout Blue Rose, Muske-Dukes’s poems make us feel, viscerally, what’s at stake.