Self-Portrait with Crayon
Poetry. "An oblique conversation with Degas reigns throughout this collection of oddly heartbreaking pieces. Against the backdrop of his paintings and sketches, we find ourselves in an intimate world, coherent but uncanny, where private memory becomes inseparable from the culture we hold in common, and all of it just barely cracked open, riven by interstices through w ...more
Paperback, 63 pages
Published
March 2nd 2009
by Cleveland State University Poetry Center
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Since this is a review item that I will be doing elsewhere (which means I'll be reading it a few more times), I'll just say for now that this is as fine a first collection as I've run across in some time. In fact, it's hard to believe that this is White's first collection. Most first collections (scratch that, most collections, period) will have some weak spots. I couldn't find any here, and found overall the collection to be a beautifully balanced and sustained effort. The poems: beautiful, sad ...more
Self-Portrait with Crayon puts words through some highly self-conscious and strenuously skeptical procedures. Benis White tells us that when she kneels down to the ground and puts her "hand inside the imprint of a hand, (she is) not nearer to touching anyone." She has found, then, an object -- a handprint in the pavement, something with several possible well-worn contexts, a child's play being one -- that quite accurately reflects on the limits of representational use words' grooved co ...more
The first book from a poet that I will definitely be following in the future.
The voice here is incredible. I know that is a cop-out in a way, but it is hard to describe in other terms. There is a fierce individuality to these pieces. Entirely prose poetry, the book has a definite cohesion to it that makes it feel less like a first book to me. The poems are what could be called confessional, though there is more mystery here, sometimes the text giving you just a taste of the perso ...more
The voice here is incredible. I know that is a cop-out in a way, but it is hard to describe in other terms. There is a fierce individuality to these pieces. Entirely prose poetry, the book has a definite cohesion to it that makes it feel less like a first book to me. The poems are what could be called confessional, though there is more mystery here, sometimes the text giving you just a taste of the perso ...more
At first, I wanted to call this collection the anti-ekphrasis, but that was wrong. These poems are ekphrastic in the truest sense: using poetry's unique rhetorical faculties, Allison Benis White illuminates Degas paintings in ways they cannot themselves. Each poem is an end result of tracing White's memory of the work through her thought process of engagement with the work, and then into darker depths. White's skills with figurative and declarative language, and of knowing the exact moment for e ...more
"I am interested in suddenness," she says in one poem. But I often feel like the poems are not sudden enough. She turns over ideas again and again so that the connections between experiences, images, and words are made in multiple ways (and beautifully so, too). But I feel that she takes too long to do this, even within the span of a poem, so that the writing feels overly labored (the hardest thing in poetry is working really hard on a poem and yet having the finished product seem e ...more
Easily one of the best first books by a poet. This is the book that poetry has needed for a long time--it's accessible, attentive to our ordinary quirks and hurts, and the language is downright beautiful. Although it claims as its territory the familiar landscape of poems--art references, familial separations--this book feels painfully new and alive. It may be that Allison Benis White can do for poems what Amy Hempel does for short stories: carves and carries their weight on a single, hard w ...more
This is a collection of poems that through meditations on Degas, deals with the author's trauma of her mother who abandons her and her father. Because the poems take Degas' artwork as a lens, her images reverberate and pile on rather than move in a linear narrative fashion. A strand of thought is quickly, and necessarily returned to the artwork and meditation at hand in incessant pursuit for understanding and healing. Foregoing line breaks, this collection of prose poem composed of fragments and ...more
As a mode of thinking, and as a way of knowing, Allison’s poems define and re-define the unresolved grief and loss one experiences when the biological, physical, and emotional bonds of motherly love break down. The complex and textured relationship between mother and daughter is revealed in the intricate texture of the poems, in the most precise and compelling lyricism I’ve read in prose poetry. The poems are ekphrastic, but not in the traditional sense. Though they inhabit the titles of Deg ...more
From my review for Crab Creek Review:
Self-Portrait with Crayon is a remarkably well-crafted set of meditations on the relationship between a missing mother, her confused and bereft daughter, and Degas' art works. Each poem tries to map the empty spaces that make up a life. These prose poems present fragments of thought in mesmerizing circles - a woman seeking to define herself, working with crucial gaps where memories should be. The mysteries of the speaker's childhood, evoked with e ...more
Self-Portrait with Crayon is a remarkably well-crafted set of meditations on the relationship between a missing mother, her confused and bereft daughter, and Degas' art works. Each poem tries to map the empty spaces that make up a life. These prose poems present fragments of thought in mesmerizing circles - a woman seeking to define herself, working with crucial gaps where memories should be. The mysteries of the speaker's childhood, evoked with e ...more
One of my favorite books this year.
Jul 04, 2009
Amy
added it
Until I research all of Degas' paintings, I don't feel I can give a full review of this volume. I believe the poem titles are all painting titles of his, but I'm not sure I would call the volume ekphrastic. The poems are quietly engaging, but shot through with almost piercing strokes of beauty, and the prose form suits them well so that they're sort of epistelary. The speaker here is lonely, motherless (her mother left her and her father), highly observant, and resigned.
I wouldn't say that she is a bad author. However, I think that the subject matter that she delves on is a little too redundant. As one of my classmates proclaimed "This book felt like a black hole, sucking away all the life within its reach." Maybe, for some people, this is a gold mine, but not for me.
The best book I've read all year and one of the best first books I've ever read. Benis White's book is mysterious, yet also concrete. I LOVE this book and everyone who cares anything about poetry should read this.
Aug 28, 2010
Ashley
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Aug 01, 2010
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May 26, 2010
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| Review of SELF-PORTRAIT WITH CRAYON | 1 | 40 | Nov 29, 2009 02:39pm |
