Ekphrasis Now

Page 13 November–December 2008 ekphrasis now Adam Clay Apoet who chooses to write an ekphrastic poem is faced with a number of challenges, the main one being the question of whether or not the poem can stand on its own. But a poet who chooses to write a collection filled with ekphrastic poems faces an entirely different challenge: one of maintaining a unified voice while exploring diverse artists. In Hadara Bar-Nadav’s first collection of poems, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, her speaker stays consistent, resolute, and direct while interweaving poems that meditate on the work of artists as diverse as Cindy Sherman, Salvador Dali, Edward Hopper, and Kiki Smith alongside poems that reveal keen insights into the idea of transformation and perception. Did I mention the poems are also beautiful? Few of the poems are longer than a page, but they manage so much in such a brief space: On sunny days I eat the sweetest grass by an electric fence that sings in middle C. and The God of Small Numbers likes tornadoes that don’t touch down, hail that calculates millimeters and rain that plays piano with one hand. Bar-Nadav’s poems explore and mediate on transformation , whether this transformation is physical or mental, literal or figurative. In “No Exit,” the speaker considers the act of grinding one’s teeth in sleep with Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Still 140 as a jumping-off point: All night I’ve wanted to rest but rest is too ambitious. Instead I’ve grown three layers of teeth. I grind bone to dust in my dreams, streaming down hotel hallways. Slowly in the poem, the speaker becomes an animal, “[f]orced to sweat and climb the stairs” with “the clop of [her] heels on concrete.” The poem ends in two questions, a shift away from the declarative statements that tend to run throughout the book: “Where are my ocean, radar, and map? / My rider and bit to guide me home?” Bar-Nadav’s conscious choice to avoid questions throughout the book becomes obvious when she ends this poem with two of them. This awareness of one’s own poetic and linguistic choices makes this entire collection, line by line, so compelling. “Women with Plum,” one of the longer poems in the book, demonstrates Bar-Nadav’s fascination with sound while also expanding the stylistic variation of the collection. In prose, she writes: Antithesis of thin. Glob. Glue. My hair trailing behind. There in the curls, a growth the size of a plum, a father with his oversized heart, and a mother clutching her kidneys, crying. Listen: you will be let go of. The world has become flat again. People walk off the edge, precipice with starfish waiting in the sea below. Fleshy palms with want in their hearts. The growth, my hearty plum, will become whatever it is. Proliferation of cells. I’m talking about sex here. The repetition of the line “I’m talking about sex here” (which occurs in all but the last section of the poem) adds to the musicality of the poem and grounds the striking images with the reassurance that there is a path the speaker is taking us down, even if it isn’t always clear. The poem’s final section asserts that “In the end it doesn’t matter if the hero dies,” and we see “St. Theresa on the news, her glass coffin wheeled through a city on a flatbed truck.” Seeing this image “on the news” contrasts sharply with the earlier sections of the poem which contain a strong sense of immediacy. Bar-Nadav distances the reader from this moment, and, with its journalistically literal view, it becomes sharply surreal if only through the way it contrasts with the other sections of the poem with “[l]ips fleshy as mushrooms” or the “[j]ars of honey wink.” These carefully crafted poems manage to have a life outside of the visual pieces from which they spring. The closing poem in the book, “Prayer (For an End),” reiterates the theme of rebirth and transformation , commenting that When the time comes my back will not be turned. I’ll...