How Light and All of Us Get Used:

On Jeffrey Bean’s ‘Woman Putting on Pearls’

Reviewed by Brian McKenna

 

Jeffrey Bean, “Woman Putting on Pearls”
Red Mountain Press
2017, 76 pages, softcover, $18.95
 

“We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.” As far as elegant descriptions of the human enterprise go, few can rival the dignifying beauty of these lines from Tom Stoppard’s play about the march of human passions across time, “Arcadia.” But the thing is, anybody can look dignified from space. Ennobling precisely because it takes the long view of humanity, Stoppard’s dialogue kindly glosses over all those indiscretions and indignities of the lone traveler in the here and now, eager to hold onto the joys they’ve gathered even as they stoop again to collect themselves. Life wears on our most Zen intentions.

All those particulars that are the lifeblood of ode and elegy, all those granular details encrusted with human affection and conflicting desires, fuel the intimate and sometimes exuberant poems in Jeffrey Bean’s latest collection, “Woman Putting on Pearls.” Rich in sensual detail and sensitive to the cumulative effects of rhetoric and diction, Bean’s poems show a remarkable ability to resuscitate the associations that define the inner lives of his speakers. Descriptive warmth combined with his ability to capture the natural rhythms of speech and movement of thought, brings the world of these speakers vividly present. The need to understand, connect, preserve, or elegize may compel them to speech, but it’s Bean’s elastic metaphors and singular imagination that band together their experiences like a net of perfectly placed bungee cords.

While four of the collection’s seven sections involve a speaker poised between reflection on his Bildungsroman days growing up in the Midwest and the hopes and fears of new fatherhood, the three intervening sections are filled with the darkly intense persona poems of Bean’s “voyeur” sequences. The collection also includes a number of exquisite ekphrastic poems inspired by Vermeer, the painter from whom the collection’s title is drawn. Describing where these poems start from, however, does little to convey where Bean’s lively intelligence and imagination carries them.

Collection opener, “The Bread,” starts the proceedings off on a relatively subdued note, lyrically recounting the unfolding intimacy of a first meeting. In an interesting organizational gambit, the human connection sought by the speaker in so many of the poems that follow is found here. Precise arrangement of every sound and detail lends the poem the feeling of a cherished memory long refined, a beloved scene regularly revisited:

The bread, the salad, simple, oiled.
        The coats on hooks, exhaling winter smoke.
The hand that was mine, the knuckles,
                the table, smooth oak.
        The girl I’d come to meet, the sky behind her hair,
                shook foil.

By capping off this opening stanza with the shudder of an allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem, “God’s Grandeur,” Bean is able to suggest the meeting’s true scope and significance. Later, in the poem’s final lines, when the speaker comes clean about the deep-seated need this meeting has fulfilled, his stark disclosure of vulnerability hits hard:

What we tasted, smelled, said, the places on my body
        she touched, the places she did not.
I had been lonely, I had been hungry as a rat.
        The glass, the salt, the road, her hands, the bread.

The unworthiness implicit in likening himself to a rat conveys exactly how unexpected and momentous this occasion is for the speaker. Additionally, Bean’s use of the pronoun “her” in the final line breaks the established article/noun pattern, giving the objects listed a warm center to gather around.

Early on, a subtle emblematic unity to the collection’s images begins to emerge, giving Bean’s poems about family and place more than a touch of Whitmanic expansiveness. The rivers, guitars, train tracks, bread, corn fields and flowers that have passed through the lives and hands of the family’s generations continue on their way. Such images seem to constitute a treasured inheritance for the speaker, as all variety of Midwestern madeleine draw him back through changing seasons and past loves. In a group of seven poems addressed to his daughter, a father offers a primer to the joys and pitfalls of youthful experience that is laced with his own autobiography. While some are surreal and read a bit like Emily Post on acid, the best of these poems show a father eager to preserve his daughter’s zest for experience by sweetly mythologizing the scope of his own. Perhaps, the richness of this emblematic heritage is nowhere better illustrated than in the cascading images of the poem, “Kid, This Is Iowa,”:

everything we are is here—
my dead grandmother as a girl
hunting fireflies in tiger lilies,
me throwing walnuts at gas cans
by the barn, stomping mud puddles,
my sticky hands lifting an apple
to my mouth. Here are dogwoods

and hills of corn that lead to more hills
of corn and more corn until the moon
comes up hot and my father
rattles the ice in his gin and tonic,
polishes his guitar.

As the poem’s convocation of images continues to breathlessly assemble, the poem’s scope continues to swell. Hopping an ocean, it follows the family bloodline back in time and across the Atlantic. Yet, with the final three lines of its penultimate stanza, the poem begins its final descent, using an indelible image of the speaker’s forbears to narrow its focus and prepare the reader for the soft landing of the final stanza:

        […] The clouds here are so long

they stretch from the hidden parts of your blood
across the Atlantic to some lost place where
every ocean is healthy again, plump with whales,
and your forbears stand on cobblestones
around a barrel fire, licking
salted whitefish off their thumbs.

With this image, a poem that had been commodious enough to accommodate whole oceans of plump whales shrinks back down to the size of a hungry forbear’s licked thumb. The image of these ancestors huddled around a barrel fire also provides a brilliant transition to the final stanza’s shift back to the immediate present, where the father burns leaves and watches his daughter climb a wooden fence from which he, figuratively or literally, still carries splinters. With such evident craft and carefully calibrated effects, Bean’s poems seem to partake of Philip Larkin’s notion that “poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation.” Each works hard to find its own best way to transmute deep feeling.

Even when the ostensive subject matter of a poem feels familiar, Bean’s angle of approach remains fresh and his language remains free of shopworn phrasings. What connects his speakers in these poems is their relentlessness as observers. They seem to luxuriate in the pleasure and mystery of experience, and Bean has the good sense to let his artful presentation of these pleasures and mysteries speak their volumes. Throughout the collection, moments crystalize into metaphors, similes, and images that are headshakingly evocative and apt. It’s a rare sort of imagination that’s capacious enough to begin a poem personifying letters so “They arrive through the mail slot, smelling of thumbs, / with the charged freshness of produce, or wings / just cut from a living thing,” while ending another poem by focusing on the disturbing gifts from a past lover still carrying a torch, by saying, “she went on / buying me beautiful shirts, my closet like / a hothouse, flowers so red I can’t sleep.”

Once drawn into the orbit of their human passions, the physical world the collection’s speakers move through is saddled with the weight of subjectivity. Even within the confines of a list poem about that most poet-y of poetic objects, flowers, Bean’s associational logic cultivates drama. Though the poem, “What Geraniums Smell Like,” consists entirely of similes in response to the question its title begs, it still manages to suggest the tale of an absence that has disrupted one family’s natural order:

Like birds.
Like my brother leaving for the lake.
Like the smudge of fireworks on driveways.
Like breath trapped in a canteen.

Like the word breath.
Like mice.
Like want.
Like a nickel in a fist.

Like my brother leaving for the store.
Like my brother leaving for the war.

The parallel structure of the final couplet in the excerpt above makes the disparity in the import of their content even more shattering. This couplet’s obvious, almost hokey end rhyme feels unpremeditated, but this first mention of “the war” retroactively colors the preceding similes a few shades darker. The “smudge of fireworks on driveways” and “breath trapped in a canteen” are no longer solely images associated with summertime, Fourth of July celebrations or camping. Though there are humorous detours in the speaker’s chain of association, sensual images informed by this period of a brother’s absence predominate:

Like my dad’s violin.
Like a cloth that cleans guns.
Like car leather.
Like a war turned low on a radio.
Like parents getting used to you gone.

Hyper-specific and oddly apt, each line in the poem’s list adds another thread in the web of sense-memory in which the speaker finds himself caught.

Bean’s ability to reveal inner life through outward gesture and salient detail finds a perfect vehicle in the collection’s ekphrastic poems inspired by Vermeer. While a cottage industry has sprung up around the writing of Vermeer ekphrastics and eminent poets from Robert Hass to Tomas Tranströmer have tackled Vermeer to mixed results, Bean’s own ekphrastics, with their humble attentiveness and lack of evident agenda, distinguish themselves. Rather than the purposeless ladling on of descriptive or psychological detail that often bogs down poems inspired by artworks, Bean’s poems offer up emotional clarity and imaginative coherence with an extremely light touch. The collection’s title poem, “Vermeer: Woman Putting on Pearls,” is a prime example of this. From a moment of exquisite homely beauty and contentment, the poem builds to one of cosmic grandeur:

Sometimes you get a minute or two,
nobody needs you for once, your body’s buoyed
by that grass-and-river feeling after lunch,

you draw back the shutters and the room
takes on the freshness of streams, hard buds
swelling up outside. It’s early spring,

you’ve got your best coat on, ermine trim,
and you lift up a necklace to the light,
to the space and quiet (it’s a gift, it asks

to be touched like this) […]

Wonderfully modulated, the voice here conjures the sort of postprandial satisfaction Bean has imagined for the woman in Vermeer’s painting, and the mood that voice establishes dovetails with the numinous elegance of the painting. Bean’s sensitivity to the effects of diction and the line break’s potential is never better than it is here. In the poem’s opening lines, the diction has a peaceable and almost offhand quality, yet it still manages to establish the poem’s conceit and convey a lot about the demands the woman is momentarily freed from. Bean’s choice use of the second person gently coaxes the reader. Shrewd enjambment at the end of line four briefly halts the light that will burst into the room in the next line. From these opening stanzas, the poem goes on taking stock of the heady pleasures of the moment before turning its attention back to the light that’s infused this confluence:

[…] light all over the wall like words

for what you wanted, words you can’t remember
now that you’re thinking what the light is really:
shattering fire, violent as birth

for billions of years out there in space, that long,
blue-cold cloth, an emptiness from which
sometimes come moons pink as hands in orbit

around a throat, a head, some pearls, warm for now.

Vermeer’s luminous atmospheres and human tenderness find disquieting complement in Bean’s “voyeur” poems. From his neighborly remove, Bean’s voyeur looks far into the life of the woman next door, exploring the endless premise of her windows. As in Vermeer, domesticity is given a frame, and the accumulation of sensual detail invokes the spiritual. From the imagined, exaggerated, and actual details of her days and nights, of her private and social life, the voyeur builds an iconography of longing, underscored by his awareness that any actual contact with her would upend it. Though there’s considerable formal diversity throughout Bean’s collection, the persona poems featuring the voyeur make particularly discerning use of both received forms and free verse. Sonnets, a villanelle, even a blues poem, provide fitting accommodations for the voyeur’s devotional intensity.

The paintings of Vermeer, which provide the impetus for a number of ekphrastic poems in the collection, also show up in several of the “voyeur” poems and create a fascinating ekphrastic/persona poem hybrid. In two deeply unsettling poems, “The Voyeur Looks at The Milkmaid, Jan Vermeer” and “The Voyeur Looks at A Woman Asleep at Table, Jan Vermeer,” Bean makes the voyeur’s identification with the figure of the artist explicit. An eerie act of transposition takes place in these poems, as the voyeur pores over paintings whose scenes and subjects mirror those he sees in the window next door. Exactly how brazen the voyeur has been in his surveillance is left an open question. Given the voyeur’s enflamed sensibilities, determining his reliability as a speaker is difficult, a fact evidenced by the opening lines of the poem, “The Voyeur Sees Her Leave in the Evening”:

Of course, I never follow when you go
to the bar in the middle of our college town
with your friends after work, so I don’t know
what you drink—hot-pink cocktails or gin,

Most purely devout when her absence is most acutely felt, the voyeur takes pride in the devotion he feels, as he does in “The Voyeur’s Prayers.” Here and elsewhere, observation serves as both sustenance and creative act:

The nights you’re not there are the nights
I am best at wanting: when I leave my house
without leaving my house, when my face’s light
looms as calm as the moon’s, my shadow still as moss.

What is it I want to see, watching your empty room,
your empty bed, your empty dresses flung down
on the floor? […]

Little details, such as the askew way a dress is described as “empty,” subtly ratchet up the intensity of these poems. As with any truthful portrait of private longing, the sense of decorum and discretion must occasionally slip to let desperation and frustration leak through. In these hot-blooded persona poems, the unsavory and sympathetic mingle. Whether this comes in the form of a revelation about a personal peccadillo or the avidity of his desire, poems such as “The Voyeur’s Gratitude” travel back and forth through voyeurism’s grey areas:

This dark afternoon in July, this all-day rain,
means you are home and your lights are on
and I can put down my book and pen
and stand for awhile in my study, in the dark,
and watch you while you work.

You have your work gloves on, your drill,
you’re hanging something on your wall,
shelves, or a mirror. You hold three nails
in your pursed lips, stand tip-toe in old jogging shoes
and a paint-flecked tank top, straining. Thank you

for your open curtains, that little mercy,
and for hiring men to trim your trees,
to restore clear air to those places that filled with green
so I can live in them again. Stand with me here a minute,
listen to the rain. We could both go out in it

The poem itself progresses slowly, steadily, detail after detail, moving like a band of rain. The languid sentence that takes the entire first stanza to unfold, establishes the poem’s hushed, reverential atmosphere. But once again, little flourishes of technique disturb the placid surface of the poem. The jarring addendum of “your drill” at the end of second stanza’s first line tugs like a Dewalt’s heavy battery, while Bean’s syntactical choice to withhold the word “straining” until the end of the following sentence brilliantly enacts the action being performed.

To say Jeffrey Bean’s craftsmanship is nimble and industrious enough to accommodate his restless imagination, is a compliment whose depth can only be understood after reading his absorbingly imagined new collection, “Woman Putting on Pearls.” Its poems capture the fundamental tensions of living even as they drill down through the strata of human emotion to reach something like bedrock humanity.

 

Brian McKenna received his MA in creative writing from Central Michigan University and is currently working on his debut collection of poetry, “The Trades.” His poetry reviews appear regularly at The Rumpus.