Louise in Love (review)

"She was held - //not by the text, but by the pretty pictures" ends the poem "Belle Vue" from the collection Louise in Love. These gorgeously dreamy poems seem to spin a tale or many tales that often journey through many little histories of "looking." They explore and provoke some of the unsightly, hidden, or simply unexamined threads of thought and action in the moments of the main "character" Louise's life. This Louise might resemble the movie star/flapper Louise Brooks (aka Lulu) whose portrait graces the cover, and one poem, "Diary of a Lost Girl" shares its title with the name of one of Brooks' films in which a girl goes down a road to ruin. This Louise also recalls the sad whimsy of a character out of Zelda Fitzgerald's Save Me the Waltz. And at times she seems like a clever sleuth in the manner of Nancy Drew. Louise poses in her multiple tableaus vivant: "Louise took the train/of her black velvet dress and leaned across the table" ("The Story of Small Cars"), "She lay on her back, receiving the silk drip of sleep..." ("And No Sign Will Mark the Midpoint's Passing"), and "She stood on a rise overlooking a road/alongside a lake that flowed into another,/and another, and another like hours/babbling their latebreaky news" ("A Cake of Nineteen Slices").

Since Louise often creates the tableaus in which she appears, the mirror becomes a vital accessory as she navigates her world, taking in and passing by her dream descriptions. How does she catch the shards and travel forward to rediscovery? She frames them in a mirror momentarily even if that disturbs self-conception and even if it thwarts temporality: "And madness, was it afflicted by demons? Or striken of God? Or vision,//thrown on an empty mirror, and there you were?" ("The Diary of a Lost Girl"). The mirror fractures and pieces together aspects of her identity at once, and for this voyeur/voyager the mirror is self and audience: "'Are we whole now?' Louise asked. 'I think we are,' the other said" and "And from the mirror: no longer blue in the face, and vague;/only destiny's dove bending a broken wing and beckoning" ("Louise in Love") and "Lexicon of appearance, the small mouth, a bow/on the present. Her face came unhinged/in a diptych mirror" ("Lexicon Louise").

One can hear echoes of Virginia Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway: "seeing the glass, the dressing table, and all the bottles afresh, collecting the whole of her at one point (as she looked into the glass), seeing the delicate pink face of the woman who was at that very night to give a party" (Mrs.Dalloway). Louise, engaged in the "unfinished business of seduction," slips and slides so easily into and out of her own dramas, and she notices, "A flat face in a mirror//framed by prettiness, flame-pink piece of paradise/pleasing the eye but never addressing the why/this why that" ("A Por- trait of Love"). Another passage from Virginia Woolf aptly describes the moments of consciousness and perception enacted in poems from this sequence: "The mind receives a myriad of impressions - trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms" (Modern Fiction).

In Louise in Love we're in the midst of a ballet of seasons and moods where the movement is constant and temperatures vary subtly. Sometimes we're poised between the weather and "towardness" and sometimes we're spinning in the turnings of her circle of friends and lovers, turning with their attitudes, their fashion, and their inventive proclamations. And we stay as "the party keeps on, its snug details melted/to a telling without any tale...." Louise's lover Ham hands out his wonderful quirky, proverbial wisdoms: "(Tell little Isabellita not to weep, Ham said,/the flowers were meant to fade. And the dried fronds//will unfold only...