Keeping Bright Company - Guest Review by Karen Lee Lewis

NB: Reading poetry is as much about how it makes you feel as it is about the meaning of the words. Sometimes, the emotion is even more important than the definitions. This review embraces that stance; it's something I hope more readers can learn to embrace. - JT

BOA Editions (2010)

Keetje Kuipers' book of poetry, Beautiful inthe Mouth, is sculpted with various bodies in mind. She has pressed them for us like flowers into her book. She grounds the work in a tangible physicality, giving the reader many different hands to hold throughout. Kuipers begins and ends with the body, and is particularly interested in its placement in the world. Her eyes paint the concrete with just enough abstraction to create layered landscapes that transform and surprise. The collection, set out in five sections, is a trail guide to light and shadow, and she pinpoints it where ever possible inside the poems, inside lit cigarettes and lamplights, inside fading paper roses and the hulls of boats. We follow the speaker as she attempts to locate a place where the light never sleeps inside her, a place where she can keep bright company, where she feels at once both alone and held together by a body that is not her own.

 

Goethe tells us that writers are on a constant search for where they belong. We feel the need of Kuipers’s characters when they ask “Let there be another town/ after this one.” The constant vibration of movement, the engine turning inside a train or truck, is never far from the heart of her speakers. She seems to want them to live on the edge of something bigger than herself. What is constant is a sense of someone clutching “at the spaces that were not there.”

The collection brings us to tenderness through betrayal. Betrayal of our own bodies, betrayal of lovers who leave us, betrayal of ghosts who haunt us by being impossibly alive, betrayal of our selves through our own destructive choices. She points out the struggle of the artist forever playing tug of war with her own need to observe when she writes “It must be criminal/ the way I stand around and watch.” And yet we are all left to hold our losses in our own hands. Kuipers’s many hands are drawn with “the frets and grooves/ of persistent calluses.” What is evident in these pages is that Kuipers is attending to the hard work of living, of needing to be touched, even brutalized if it makes the speaker feel alive and in control. Sometimes it’s more tolerable if you see the pain coming, or view it as something you’re being punished for. Subjugation can be an odd form of self-protection. How many of us are like the “dog who trashes the house and then cowers when her master comes home”?

What emerges from this collection is beauty sculpted into the form of well made poems. Kuipers writes “I made that/ tender bird of desire nestle in my mouth.”  When the book ends we feel as if we must turn our speaker loose. Whether like a bird or “a collarless dog” she must be able to run wild and unfettered toward the next, fresh landscape because that is where her future poems reside.