Constance Stadler
Sublunary Curse
chapbook review by
As I state on the back cover this chapbook is challengingly complex, though it might have been better had the book been eighty or one hundred pages long, rather than forty, it provides as it is a fully digestible and enjoyable intellectual and aesthetic treat in a pleasant bite-size serving.
Highlights include a lengthy but strategically spread out tribute to Mr. Poe, and a vigorous description of clitoridectomy witnessed as an anthropologist, with a flexible awareness of the complicity of observers and theoreticians, perhaps especially given the, often, stance of ready acceptance of diversity that anthropologists are taught to adopt.
The voice of the poet is agile and acute, she dissects with alacrity phenomena such as dating and expectations, bad parenting, sexuality, poems and the poetry of the flesh.
The words are transparent and sparkle, they are assembled on the page with perfect moderation and restraint and exist where they have to.
From this hospital window
I can see
the mottled reflection
of black leaves trembling
in night breezes.
Keeper of the watch
Ever calm, ever bright
brings stark illumination
of the glass paned
still life
(from “Insomnia Rx”)
There are passages that perfectly capture the charming but frightening madness that lurks beneath the convoluted surfaces of this insipid existence
I fill the still cavity till
brimming
see the water pouring forth
as I pour viscous blue
and then I hear it:
“Let me in.”
If only I could climb deep low
curling around
the rhythmic agitation of purification
and bleach these wounds white.
(from “washing machine”)
In one case, “Matinal Malediction”, a whole poem constitutes a curse built to mirror the everyday, the process of cleaning the teeth. These poems are intellectually ambitious and, as anthropologists do, they analyze the small, the everyday, and from there their structure which constructs our view of “primitive” and other society arises. In a sense, one can read this as amle as an anthropologist donning a female body in order to present to us the experiences of living that body and its madnesses. And though the tone is one of academic restraint that can be dropped, as in the poem to the inadequate father, and the confused corporeality shine forth from the bloody wound.
As these poems shine, as does the whole little book, A must to buy – all this for a paltry fiver. So buy it HERE.
David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there in a cottage on a hill with a woman, five selfish cats, and a stupid puppy. He has a BA in History from Oxford, and an unconnected MA in philosophy, much later, from Stockholm. Details of his three available full length poetry books, various chapbooks, and almost 850 poems in or forthcoming at 340 places online or in print over the last couple of years, are at his blog, AUTOEROTIC ELEGIES. He never submits by snail mail since he has little money and since he loves, or at least doesn't have anything against, trees. There's a new chapbook of dead snakes at Rain over Bouville, another is coming from Poptritus Press in the summer sometime. A novella Henrietta forgets is forthcoming from Isms Press. Round the beginning of next year a large anthology of his poetry called laughing at funerals from Epic Rites Publications, as well as a 50 poem chapbook called Hellbound which is appearing sooner.
