Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2018. 120 pages. $16.00.
“Then my eyes got hungry,” Diane Seuss announces in her fourth collection of poetry, Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. This hunger becomes the driving force in the book, as Seuss fuses the stuff of personal history with the history of visual art. In particular, Seuss takes on the genre of still life painting, known for paying attention to the seemingly unimportant—the crumbs left on the table, the apples tossed haphazardly (or meant to look haphazardly tossed) in a bowl. Impressively, Seuss’s gaze is not only at home ranging from an eighteenth-century painting to a Walmart parking lot, but able to pull taut the threads between them. The result is a virtuosic treatise on art, gender, class, loss, and the hungers brought to bear on each.
It’s with this hunger that Seuss begins the title poem, named after a painting by Rembrandt that is at once serene (the girl half smiles as she rests her arms on a window frame) and gruesome: “She comes out of the dark seeking pie, but instead finds two dead peacocks.” It’s a “dead beauty, gratuitous” she’s stumbled upon, recalling another name for still life, nature morte (literally, “dead nature”). But Seuss’ version of the painting does not remain still, instead suggesting action and transgression: “The girl must pull the heavy bird into the night and run off with it.” That must is important—she must respond to the hunger, must disrupt the painting in the same way Seuss disrupts the sonnet form holding the poem.
Seuss’s notes to the book include multiple references to Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, and it’s worth a brief detour through art history as we take in the poet’s bigger project. Bryson’s essays bring our attention to the distinction between “megalography” and “rhopography.” The former is “the depiction of those things in the world which are great—the legends of the gods, the battles of heroes, the crises of history.” The latter is the domain of still life, “the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that ‘importance’ constantly overlooks.” Perhaps not surprising, then, that still life was long considered the lowest genre of painting and closely associated with the feminine.
In Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl, Seuss becomes a master of “rhopography” while complicating the genre’s gendered implications. In “Bowl,” a chorus of women perform interchangeable and menial tasks, much like the “bowl” of the poem’s title. “We work at the factory until it shuts down and then we work in the deli section or the meat counter,” they assert. But Seuss shows that it would be a mistake to read them as unimportant. Again, in the words of Bryson, though “Even their names seem demeaned—jug, jar, bowl, pitcher—yet the forms of still life have enormous force.” We see this force in “Stateline Pastoral,” where Seuss takes her most sustained hold of the communal voice. The poem begins with the Whitmanic gesture turned feminine: “Our hair is large. It contains multitudes / of pins and nits and bows. Our bodies are wrong but coherent.” The “we” in the poem is wry, battered, wary of art (though, “If it’s pretty, we taxidermy our kill”), and haunted by memory. It’s the voice of those who are most often found “nursing the sick or doing dishes.”
Throughout the book, Seuss’s portraits of women work to confront a long-troubled history of representation. We see this particularly through two sections of “Self Portraits” (twelve poems in total), where the speaker “paints” the self again and again, with each additional portrait adding to and complicating the overall representation of the speaker. The first section employs deeply personal portraits, while the second interprets the self through other artists, i.e. “Self Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid, “Self Portrait with Amy [Winehouse] (Creation Myth).” In “Self Portrait with Levitation,” the speaker wrestles with being a bodied woman, recalling how she could levitate as a child, but dropped to the floor when she turned ten: “From then on, inhabiting my body felt shameful.” Or, as she says later, “To confess to embodiment is to become / a tender of graves, like my mother, for whom / grave-tending is the only religion.” But already, as we’ve seen in “Self Portrait with My Dead Looming Behind Me,” and as we’ll come to know more intimately in “Memento Mori,” the speaker is such a tender of graves.
In addition to exploring nature morte, the speaker grieves the deaths of loved ones, including the death of her father. The book has several virtuosic poems that stand alone, but perhaps its strongest is “Memento Mori,” a meditation on the father’s illness and early death, the speaker’s experience with both as a child, and the ways we must all negotiate mortality, as we see when the speaker reflects on the sign hung above a bone house in Portugal, “We bones that here are, for yours await”:
“We bones,” as if the bones are sentient beings,
like greeters at Walmart who are there to remind us that we, too,will be greeters at Walmart, it’s only a matter of time. There with our
pole at the prow of the ferry. And here have I built, from these coupletsof metacarpals and metatarsals, a memento, a bone chapel
where the brave may pray and confess and baptize their children.
“Memento Mori,” like “Stateline Pastoral,” receives its own section in the book. In total, Still Life is divided into thirteen sections, using fragments of the titular painting as dividers. While the painting itself is fragmented, the book is paced both confidently and effectively. The reader moves between sections the way they might move between rooms in a museum, or across the frame of a painting, at once invited to dwell within and connect across.
Six of the book’s sections are comprised of single poems, including the opening and closing which powerfully frame the collection. In the opening poem, “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called Paradise,” Seuss evokes a scene lush with flowers. The speaker has already been “told some girls / slide their fingers over the frame and feel the air outside of it, / and some even climb over the edge and plummet into whatever // is beyond it.” Yet long before we reach the final poem’s avowal, “I Climbed Out of the Painting Called Paradise,” such a plummet seems inevitable. Importantly, it’s the speaker’s mother, or the memory of her, that calls her out of the painting: “Mother with purple rivers of veins in her hands.” Mother who is, for a moment, the artist: “I could picture her arranging / peaches in a bowl.” In this final poem, the daughter turns her back on the painted paradise as she literally finds her way home. Seuss is a master of sharp edges, but it’s the tenderness of these poems that fells me time and again, a tenderness that lives alongside, not in spite of, the bite.
Ultimately, it’s the strength of the “overlooked” that Seuss honors, with its warts and wonder alike. “The Heroic Penetrates the Quotidian,” she acknowledges, “but the quotidian, like a cockroach, / has strength in numbers.” And so, the personal sections of the book speak to the communal, and vice versa. The girl in the painting is both alone and not alone, and the table spread with fruit is both the present and the past repeating. That’s the thing about still lifes, with their focus on the elemental—the bowl, the table, even the skull—they float between centuries, as if we could again step into their worlds any moment. Or, as Seuss illustrates, we might at last step out.
Works Cited
Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Harvard University Press, 1990.
