On Bright Stain by Francesca Bell

Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2019. 103 pages. $16.95.

It’s tempting to call the poems in Francesca Bell’s arresting debut collection Bright Stain risky, but “risk” is one of those words so overused in relation to contemporary poetry that it has almost become a cliché. Risk, according to Emily Dickinson, is “the Hair that holds the Tun.” If the poem is a wine cask, risk is the thin cord holding it “Seductive in the Air.” At any moment, the cord may snap, the cask may fall, the tightrope walker may slip and tumble into the abyss. Risk is what keeps the reader reading, and so it is with Bright Stain, a book of poetry that does not recoil from difficult or taboo subject matter—such as abortion, pedophilia, rape, and murder—but rather faces it squarely, inhabits it even, so that the risk is ultimately rewarded through the reader’s identification and empathy.

Although thoroughly modern in its use of free-verse narrative and lyric forms, there’s a Baroque sensibility at work in the collection as a whole, specifically the mingling of religious and sexual themes. John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14” and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa come to mind as examples from this period, but unlike Donne, Bell’s speakers are beset with doubt and disbelief. In one poem, “In Which Mary Advises You to Have the Abortion,” Mary, Mother of God tells the reader, “Speak your belated No / to the great god—.” And while Mary announces that “A woman’s door is always ajar,” the reader hears that door slam shut over and over again throughout the book. In the poem that precedes it, “Definitions,” the speaker offers the same rejection but in figurative terms:

Am I not your receptacle,
vacancy on two legs,
opening in the front
you pour yourself into?
You leave me with child
who will leave me
with nothing
but biology’s bit
stuffed into my mouth,
body split like a lip
and gaping.

Throughout the book, Bell confronts traditional notions of femininity and sexuality and reinvents archetypal female characters—both biblical and historical—through a distinctly feminist lens, in the sense that the poems react to the problem of male violence. This lens extends to a group of persona poems in the voices of pedophilic priests and their victims, and it is here where the Baroque conjoining of the religious and the erotic takes a dark turn. In “My Body Broken for You,” for example, the speaker presents his crime as a kind of sacrament:

I want to bathe him in this cleansing,
hot stream, baptize myself
in the pure flowing drops
of his tears. Look at us.
Look at us before you, Lord.
We are bursting. We are flames.
We are flowers. We are Your holy,
Your broken, faithful children.

The use of persona is a distinctive feature of Bright Stain, or rather, it is Bell’s choice of personas that is noteworthy. Besides abusive priests, the book includes poems in the voices of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom either wittingly or unwittingly reveal their own racism and misogyny. Other poems, while technically not persona poems, use the second or third-person point of view to present the psychology of murderers and rapists. Even Jeffrey Dahmer gets his own poem, which is also infused with the religious themes that pervade the book:

In prison, he asked if forgiveness
was even possible for him.
The chaplain didn’t hesitate.
The Lord, he told him, makes no exceptions.
Jeffrey Dahmer did not resist

while the inmate with the metal bar
bludgeoned him to death. He waited, patient
on the prison’s bathroom floor, for God
who gathers our shards, every splintered
fragment, into His boundless hands.

It is this conflict between the holy and the unholy that undergirds the collection and gives it tension. Furthermore, Bell’s use of tone and diction lends the work a textural quality; bumps, gashes, and rough edges abound. In “Dreaming Helen Keller,” however, Bell weaves a softer, finer thread, as she once again merges the spiritual and the erotic, this time in the form of an ars poetica that serves double duty as a love poem:

If only someone would whisper poems
          along the insides of my arms,

a hymn sung by fingertips
                    across my belly, all the way

to the peak of each breast,
          my body’s rafters reverberating.

Then, a suspenseful little story
          unfolding up and down my thighs,

finally, a cacophony,
                    both lyrical and guttural:

let my little cave echo, trill, open
          like a throat to answer. O, fill my body—

this clumsy, mute organ—with song.

In terms of both form and subject matter, Bell’s closest contemporary poetic relative may be Sharon Olds. Like Olds, Bell takes traditionally taboo subjects and holds them up to the light, exploring their anatomy. Both poets also write exquisite narrative poems, including poems about childhood and adolescence. But it is Bell’s ability to move effortlessly between forms and speakers that distinguishes her work. The organization of the book contributes to its continuity, as subjects and voices recur and reverberate across sections. Most distinctly, the lyric poems resonate with a quiet but powerful music, an urgency that can only be called prayer, as in “Want”:

This is the world I want.
World of hunger.
World of soft breeze and keening.

Lord, let me famish,
devour my body’s weight
in summer evening light,

ache for sky
and the trees’ outline—
a gaping mouth—

against it. Let me be
the dark shape, sharp
against what is bright.

What makes Bell’s work so unique is the juxtaposition of these moments of quiet lyricism with the more startling subject matter and tones of the persona poems. In a way, poems such as “Want” do for the book as a whole exactly what the last stanza describes—they become studies in contrast. Against the white space of the page, Bell’s poems sear themselves into memory.