“ Reviews
"Richard Lovelace defiantly proclaimed that 'stone walls do not a prison make' but the implication is that we make our own prisons and they can be anywhere: a car, a house, your own body, a sunlit street. Cheryl's poems are letters from prison, from all these prisons and more, but the book is not confining. Over and over again, we are given hints about how to make the most of our stay. I spent a good deal of time wondering just what the 'prisoner's dilemma' might be. I never found a definitive answer, but the book left me with a strong impression that the dilemma is whether or not to accept one's sentence. Do you become Houdini or King Rat? Typical of a poet, Cheryl wants to be both at once, and in these pages, it seems almost possible."
---Don Zirilli, contest judge
Cheryl Snell’s book: Prisoner’s Dilemma is a gorgeous, wrought book, complete with haunting artwork form her sister, Janet Snell. The book chronicles pain and dilemma, how to get through pain, what pain is. Her poems evoke mystery, reality, lyricism and in-your-face longing, hurt, tragedy an almost unstated questioning of how to get through it all. While reading this book I felt an uncanny connection to everyone: that surely, there must be others out there who have lived lives scripted mostly by loss and unspeakable hurt.
Cut
I start with the curls,
snip the dark with the silver,
somersaulting to the floor.
If I drop the scissors you’ll say
that one of us is unfaithful—
but I’m not superstitious, and I know
the quirks of scissors: twin arms
easily uncoupled; better together
though crossed as swords.
What is splendid about some of the poems is what could lie beneath the words. In the above poem the author never says why the hair is being cut – the poem focuses on superstition and a coupling of two people. Always, to my mind, the cutting of hair in writing and life, signifies something else – renewal, betrayal, anger, hope, envy, viciousness.
In the poem, Eating Beauty, there are meanings each reader would interpret differently, I suppose. My favorite line is:
Since there is no one here to forbid it,
As if beauty, itself, is forbidden, should be hidden, not “right” or moral. And this conjures all sorts of political and women’s issues. Aside from the sheer “beauty” of the line.
And the collection itself is beautiful. Make of that what you will.
--Nanette Rayman -Rivera
OUTWARD BOUND
“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” *
But for mystics, the disabled and convalescent, those in enclosed orders, those dedicated to fulfilling their genius, those in jail and those who exist in a mental straitjacket, whatever the cause, there is always a conundrum:
Does the elusive Truth exist on the Inside or Outside?
Hostages like Brian Keenan, Anne Frank, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, all attested a life of the spirit and the imagination that would not and could not be limited by physical and ideological constraints.
So does narrowed focus confer a sharper and profounder vision, offering its compensations? Or is Freedom only to be found upon the exterior, in the prolix toil and muddle of human activity where opportunities for discovery abound? Even where choice is possible, aren't these states mutually exclusive?
Cheryl Snell in a new chapbook, Prisoner's Dilemma, explores this theme in situations concerning many kinds of effacement. Each short poem is offered like a remnant of woven fabric placed under the microscope so that the colours, slubs and knots and arabesques, can be appreciated. The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope. The images juxtaposed in Snell's phrases cleverly release new flights of meaning as, for example in Dirty Laundry:
Tumbling from the fold
of a fitted sheet – balled-up
silk, some foreign lace. Things come
and go in this house. Last night, an earring
tangled in the wrong colour hair, everything
gone bloodshot and damp.
The man's non-sequiturs circled the drain
of his stranger's ear: Let lovers go fresh and sweet
to be undone. How else to go
with a come-on like that – innocent as soap,
pink bubbles bursting like an alibi
on the verge of coming clean.
The collection as a whole hangs together with the shape and atmosphere of René Magritte's surreal painting The Empty Mask and, in miniature, I don't doubt is as accomplished. Cheryl Snell ably demonstrates that Richard Lovelace was right!*
RJC
(Rosy Cole)
Chapbook hauntingly illustrated by Janet Snell. ”
