Brushstrokes and glances (review)

In Djelloul Marbrook's first book, the award-winning Far from Algiers, the speaker's mother is remembered "with a sob and permanent dismay." Now she has turned into somebody a little closer to a role model.

Marbrook's mother and aunt were both artists. An almost abstract work by the latter, Irene Rice Pereira, is reproduced on the cover of Brushstrokes and glances. Another aunt died while still at art school. Marbrook tells us in a final note how a small landscape by Corot—which is displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC—helped him through a gloomy period that began (or possibly ended) with "a rattling moment of despair." But all the artists mentioned in this book "moved me to write," he says. While writing clearly is Marbrook's own vocation, he possesses a painter's keen visual sense and an eye for the telling detail.

Brushstrokes and glances is a poetry collection about seeing but also the unwillingness to see. According to Marbrook, learning how to do so is necessary; on the other hand, it isn't always easy or pleasant. It may even be dangerous: "I think that the danger of UV / is not as great as seeing well."

The superior reality hinted at in great works of art isn't necessarily comforting or helpful. In some cases, if we may trust Marbrook, it's so unexpected as to be shocking: "Some brushstrokes frighten me." And even when benign, their influence may be difficult to understand: "I navigate their styles, / sail along their strokes, / but there's a great within, / an undersea mysterium." Marine images such as these are prominent in the book; they effectively indicate the contrast between surface details and unexpected depths beneath. "More always rises than meets the eye," the poet asserts in a sequence called "Manhattan reef." Some imagery here is beautiful: "Storms / will be heaven's business, whales / will sing of the coming race; / even blades of light / will learn to rust."

So in a sense it isn't what is visual in the visual arts that matters to Marbrook but, paradoxically, what we don't literally see, and whose existence we take on trust. Sometimes, in this context, he draws close to mysticism—an experience so profound that it may not even be possible or necessary to describe it in sensuous terms. This is probably why he, or his persona, says about an art museum, "I'd like to stay here / when the lights go out." In a poem about Goya, Marbrook asserts in a similar vein "I know what blossoms at midnight." There is a paradox at the heart of Brushstrokes and glances: to see is deeply significant, yet what we see cannot be trusted.

He reminds me of Iris Murdoch, who sometimes in her fiction lets a painting provide a spiritual experience—a kind of substitute for religion in a secularized world.

A wolf appearing in a text called "Artemisia Cavelli" seems to symbolize the unpredictable and unexpected in this artist's work, perhaps also what we call inspiration. Cavelli is fictitious but based on a real-life Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. The poem begins with the line "I am Artemisia followed by a wolf" and closes intriguingly with the statement "One or two of you at certain corners / turn and for an instant see my wolf."

Elsewhere, Corot is described as "Painter of undersides of leaves"—what tends to be hidden or neglected. And in a poem titled "I saw Mona Lisa once," Marbrook again digs deep for what is normally concealed, the genuine meaning of a work of art (supposing there is only one such meaning):

No doubt first impressions count,but something's to be said for mining goodin what we handily misunderstood.

A little later, he asserts: "The eye is best that distrusts the mind." Here "mind" is a synonym for "intellect" or "reason" or "common sense."

All this means that for Marbrook the arts have more than an aesthetic function: they may be didactic and even liberating as well. In a...