Read the full text of the poem by clicking the image or purchase it here.
The Poem:
The restrained longing expressed in this poem is well suited to the Villanelle, its pattern of repeated lines and end rhymes creating an obsessive focus on the woman being painted. She's naked enough for the speaker to see the scar across her ribs, but she remains distant, even as she intoxicates him. It's all so seamless in Primm's hands, how the brush is both on the woman's body and the canvas, how she is both present and absent, but it's actually quite difficult to do. Most Villanelles fail because the writer contorts the language to fit the form, making something so obviously artificial it fails to satisfy. Not here. The phrases slide through the repetition just as someone would say them today. It ends, as required, with the repeated lines, sealing this couple into a kind of permanent non-embrace. It's form beautifully following function.
The Poet:
Eric Primm is an engineer for the Boeing Company and a fiction writer in the University of Missouri - St. Louis MFA program. Architrave is his first publication.
No comments:
Post a Comment