cherylsnell

• Rated 5 stars

“The Metaphysics of Connection
What is the nature of reality? How do emotions distort it? The liminal state between what’s known and what’s not is a threshold rife with the unfathomable. Begging readers’ willing suspension of disbelief, Sheila Deeth allows us to enter, through colloquial but poetic language and vivid descriptions, into the porous consciousness of her characters.
Flower Child explores the grief of Megan, who miscarries the daughter she names Angela for the angel she hopes she has become. But the child is in limbo, tethered to a place that recalls the Garden of Eden, a plane inhabited by angel-guardians who watch over babies until they are born. The babies who aren’t, (i.e. Ms. Deeth introduces a pair of siblings aborted in favor of a third baby) stay enveloped in flower pods, swaddled in greenery. “I was safe and secure, wrapped in my nest of leaves ‘til it was time to wake again” Angela says, just after being miscarried.

The story is alternately narrated by Angela and her mother, so intimately and intricately connected, but each is unsure of the other. Angela worries that her mother doesn’t want or love her, while Megan believes the glimpses of her little girl are dreams or hallucinations. To connect over such chasms of space and time seems impossible, but somehow they do—Angela, growing faster than a human child, goes through the usual stages of development on Megan’s watch. Like any mother, she becomes suspicious, judgmental, then panicked when Angela eats the proverbial apple.
Moving from temptation to temptation, Angela falls in love with Elisha, one of the triplets sacrificed for the health of his sibling. With his love, Angela “feels real”, but her mother is still in emotional limbo. In the climactic scene echoing the Passion of Christ, Angela struggles with her choice: self preservation or altruistic sacrifice; with the skillful tying together of theme and allusion across genres, Ms. Deeth has her act on her decision.
The metaphysical complexity of the conclusion, the conflation of the mortal and immortal, recalls Freud’s theory about the nature of reality -- the idea that though reality is intersubjective, this “collective hallucination” is experienced by people in both congruent and divergent ways. The shifting perspectives of Deeth’s characters underscore the dynamic nature of reality, and Ms. Deeth makes us believe in a character not of this earth as easily as her all too human mother.
Flower Child is catalogued as speculative Christian fiction; but like most labels, that falls short in describing a novella combining the lyrical and the literary with the quotidian and the extraordinary to make a unique and touching story that will be hard for any reader to forget.
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cherylsnell wrote this review Friday, September 30, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“ At the intersection of altruism and abstract thinking, how far will mathematician Nela go to rescue Ranu? A deeply felt novel on sacrifice, survival, and the mysterious alchemy of love.”

cherylsnell wrote this review Friday, September 10, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 5 stars

“Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman
November 6, 2010
Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such
moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a
novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then
their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is
reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding
confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a
fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples
of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of
consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.
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cherylsnell wrote this review Sunday, November 7, 2010. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Cheryl Snell brings us Flower Half Blown a 25 page chapbook of varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives.

--Comstock Review”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Cheryl Snell brings us ...Epithalamion (Little Poem Press, 2004), ...a 64 page collection with an unusual binding. Inside it’s vintage Snell but more surreal, and with more Hindu content and themes. Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“The Satires of Horace
Translated by A.M. Juster
ISBN: 0812240901
University of Pennsylvania Press
160 pg, $34.95
Reviewed by Cheryl Snell

A.M. Juster's accessible new translation of The Satires of Horace combines elements of the English light verse with a close interpretation of the Latin text. Juster wanted to write a version of the satires faithful to the Latin, but one that was “fun to read” --one that brought out the true spirit of the poems. Fairclough, Alexander, Mueke, Rudd, Matthews and others had tried, and some would say, failed in various ways. So Juster took on a formidable task; he set about contemporizing the idiom while retaining rhythmic and formal patterns. He found cultural equivalents in the crossover of languages. He struck a conversational tone that captures the wit and enduring charm of Horace. And he did it in rhyming couplets.

On his choice of heroic couplets, Susanna Braund notes that “When we read this translation, if we find ourselves thinking of more elevated poetry in the same meter—for example, Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid or Pope’s translation of the Iliad—this means that the translator has succeeded at duplicating the effect that Horace’s hexameters must have had on his contemporary audience.”

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-3 B.C.) wrote two books of satires. They are not what we think of as satires today: there are no blood-thirsty political or personal attacks. These verses poke gentle fun at man’s foibles and vices, and the tone swings between elegiac and comic. The satire usually deals with one type of vice at a time, and the satirical attack is framed as an argument or a debate. Topics range widely, from greed and envy (1.1), to lust (1.8) to ambition (1.10—“I did make comments, undeniably,/stating Lucilius's poetry/stumbles on clumsy feet.”)

Book I opens with three “diatribe” satires which are like sermons carefully calculated not to offend those in power. They are didactic and dramatic, with well differentiated voices. A theme introduced with humor is often illustrated by a series of antithetical pairs before a second theme emerges. The Horatian persona mocks human failings, while an adversary eggs him on. In 2.1, Trebatius plays the role of such an adversary. The poem begins with Horace saying, “There is a group who claims my satire seems/too harsh... Others call it ‘slack’…” and he asks, “Trebatius, how should this be addressed? Decide.” (In his Notes, Juster explains why he chose “decide” over others scholars’ “tell me, “give me advice,” and “give a ruling”).
The difference between the Horatian persona in Book 2 and Book I occurs with the reply, “Give it a rest.” This advice, urging Horace to write a different type of poem, in praise of Caesar, perhaps, doesn’t appeal to Horace. He does not think he has the “motivation.” He will follow the example of his predecessor Lucilius, and write in only self-defense.
The Horatian persona’s reaction to Trebatius shows a change in him. He’s less self-assured than the narrator in Book 1, and from this point on, his self-deprecating humor reveals the same flaws in his own character that he once satirized in others. This opposition and contradiction, the balancing between extremes, is a typical strategy in Horace. Author and critic Michael Coffey calls 2.1 a “fundamentally frivolous piece,” but it does illustrate some of the pitfalls of writing satire. It should be sharp-edged and witty, but with its claws sheathed, or it might be misunderstood, with deadly results. Horace humbly suggests that that is his goal.

The Horace of 2.1 shares some traits with the Boor in 1.9. Both men describe their social-climbing plans with similar phrases. The doubling and self-parody does not make the narrator a less sympathetic character, though. He still delivers his moral with a quickness of line and pitch-perfect tone. In 1.9, when the Boor wants Horace to introduce him to his patron Maecenas, his imprecations cause Horace to react physically, another of satire’s trademarks. “…streams of sweat cascade onto my feet” and “I drop my ears like sullen donkeys do.” (referring to Horace’s nickname, Flaccus). There is irony in the difference between the language and the vice dramatized by the Boor. In satire, as Northrop Frye has said, irony is militant.
In 2.6, Horace pits the idyllic qualities of a country retirement against the chaos of city life. Maecenas had given him the Sabine farm, and this poem is a thank-you. It ends with the Aesop-like fable of the city and the country mouse, and the moral that life in the country is better. Contrast Juster’s opening to this poem, “These are the thing I hoped my prayers would bring:/some land, a kitchen garden and a spring/that’s always flowing by a house below/a modest stand of trees. The gods bestow/on me far more and better; I am content”, with Fairclough’s version--

This is what I prayed for ! -- a piece of land not
so very large, where there would be a garden, and
near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and
up above these a bit of woodland. More and better
than this have the gods done for me. I am content.

…and you can see how Horace’s ancient wit and charm becomes fresh and immediate, concise and fluid in A. M. Juster’s hands. This work stands out. With meticulous scholarship and skillful poetics, Juster has given us a translation accessible enough for casual readers and intricate enough to interest classicists. The book can be ordered at Amazon, University of Pennsylvania Press website, and the author’s website http://www.amjuster.com/






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cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“ Within these pages, we find ourselves in the presence of a modern day Circe, a many- faceted, singer of deeply nuanced songs. She is not afraid of turning taboos inside out, whether it’s phone sex (Trout), her own youthful pretensions (Great Poet), or post-menopausal crushes (It Can’t Happen). The element of confession is woven into the lyric narratives; images and startling comparisons turn into and against each other, often coupling the everyday with the epic—“Dear Orpheus, listen;/Euridice sings too. She knows more/about dark sweet earth,/how to plant deep and sure--/more than the strumming boys do.” (Heartland, Revisited)

We consider the puzzle of poems bound by their own rules as Kallet experiments with flexible nonce forms, pantoums, and free-verse narratives tweaked with edgy, outspoken observation--“Jews don’t do mummies. Who has time?” in “Cat Mummy” for instance. Original characterizations and painfully accurate revelations abound. Scorpions are likened to Rockettes, and about her mob-connected father, she says, “A shame he never got the chance to vote.” Sometimes the twist that makes a subject new is experimental, as in the poem “Where Identity Doesn’t Rest.” A meditation on memory, the poem’s aesthetic tension of traditional narrative moves against a stylistic innovation that recalls Brenda Hillman.

The book’s three sections entwine geography with history, the global with the personal. Contradictions cohere in a space where lessons surface in dreams (Circe, Did You?), loss does not mean giving up or giving in (Out of Silence, for Sister Wendy), and melancholy is cast in unexpected images (Jealous). Intellectual scope, both deep and broad, a command of craft, and ease with both colloquial and formal utterance mark the work.

Kallet embraces all flesh and blood experience. No subject is off-limits, and humor often thwarts the reader’s expectations, in the best possible way. In “No Sale,” the poet brings together blues, love, and religion when she asks, “How would a Jewish girl/sell her soul to the devil?/Reformed don't believe/In Beezlebubba” and goes on recap the tale of Robert Johnson, selling his soul “at the crossroads/for a lifetime of hot-lick guitar./Shot by a jealous husband/at the roadhouse, he died on his knees/they say, drunk, barking like a dog./ When she ends the poem with a segue into the personal-- “Odd, for a nice Jewish girl/to fall on her knees./Years though, that's how/it was. Me shot down,/baying at the moon/for a lick of you”, we feel the empathetic tug that is a hallmark of good poetry.

She may banter in opening poems such as “No Makeup” --

I'll have to rely on poetry,
won't I?
And how, at fifty, I love
nakedness
in my face and lines,
and in your hands, dear reader.

---but pulls in to an elegiac tone in poems on the Holocaust in the third section. Kallet, a Lindsay Young Professor of English at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, draws from her deep well of literary and historical knowledge for these stricken poems. Under the poignant heading Breathing Daughters, this sequence singles out one survivor from the author’s family, Hedwig Schwartz, who, though “Nearly blind./you bore witness.” In this work, researched with fragments of letters, historical records, and other documents, the living must speak for the dead, as the past with its fragmented voices bodies forth Hart Crane's lines: "It is blood to remember; it is fire/to stammer back."

There is no stammering in this book, but plenty of blood, and an unquenchable fire that make Circe, After Hours an exceptional, many-layered book.


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cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Thirst
by Patrick Carrington
Codhill Press
www.codhill.com
ISBN 978-1-930337-26-8
32 pages, $10
Reviewed by Cheryl Snell
In this chapbook, winner of the Codhill Poetry Chapbook Prize for 2006, the title announces the theme; the poems locate it in the personal. Patrick Carrington touches on several kinds of “Thirst”—for communion and connection, for a deeper understanding of faith and the way it operates in daily life.

“Learning History in Nursery School” opens the collection with a tender scene—a father watching his small son fingerpaint on a rainy day. “He didn't repeat the world's mistakes./ He made the sun yellow, the sky as blue/ as a new boy…/” When a rainbow appears, signaling a moment of transformation, the speaker observes, “The sky was copying him, siphoning/ off the street some long forgotten oils. //
The father and son relationships are drawn with care in this book. In “Finding the Sound of Oak,” the narrator recollects climbing his father like a tree, and wonders if the dead “ever leave at all?/ Maybe/it’s a trick, slipping into dirt/like a root.” He returns with his regrets “to these woods with no tongue/and barefoot. To walk quietly,/listening for his risen bones.//
Other portraits of grief are equally affecting—memories of lost love locked “In the Cedar Boxes of Our Souls,” “… a wooden place/that hurts, but understands/the mathematics of the morning after/ and in “The Smoke of St. Anthony,” where Carrington balances simple language with complex thought, the personal with the spiritual, building a poignant portrait of loss:
I used my last match and lit the candle,
watched smoke curl up to—where?—

Her, I imagined. A vain act of love
but full of sacrifice I thought,
as badly as I needed a drag.
And faith, as hard as days finish now

without her. They end stiffer than the wood
the sisters used to beat belief
and the blood of Jesus out of me. Yet I

come back for more. I called her name,
louder than I meant to. I heard it echo
in the rafters. The roof was higher
than her uncle’s tobacco barn
where we lit our first cigarette,
where she always went to disappear
as quiet as a prayer.

I lit candle from candle, until the smoke
was thick. I just can’t shake the hope
or kick the habit, the notion
she might be hiding up there,
waiting for me, swinging
her legs from the crossbeams.
This is sensuous, tactile work, alive and vivid. Although there is an elegiac undertone in some of the poems, reminding one of Frost’s observation, “The poet rubs his fingers along old wounds, makes them burn,” humor breaks through. A “…wife just knitted/ a wool sweater for their toy poodle. /Overkill, he told her. It already has/ a coat/” in “The Logic for Improving a Neighborhood” is one example of how the poet incorporates different tones in the same poem, and balances them all.
The way the poems are organized is another subtle delight of the book. The poet develops sequences of imagery, tone, and theme in “A Heraldry of Hands,” for instance, which opens out into “First Lessons in Grace,” threading the motif of hands through both poems. Repetitions like this build resonance and make the separate poems cohere. In “Searching for Things to Worship,” the speaker’s spiritual quest is once more reflected in a gesture:
Sorting through fluttering debris
of thick boyhood days, tangle of jungle
browned with our absence,
I remember how you cupped
water at Cedar Creek,
your hands a chalice. And flowers
you planted near the bank
to make it your church,
somewhere to sit in the greening
comfort of a private prayer.
A place one might see God
and not be surprised.
Along with the lyric depth and philosophical sophistication, well-honed craft is evident in this work, the use of sound to control cadence and syncopation, assonance and consonance. Whether there’s sometimes too much sibilance depends on a reader’s taste; there is much to admire in the line breaks, with the last word in a line creating multiple, or sometimes half- meanings, displacing the expected and opening interpretation to a new circumstance created by the language.
W. H. Auden defined prayer as “to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.” With its reverence for nature and its embrace of what it means to be alive, “Thirst” has that quality of prayer. This meditative, attentive volume by a very thoughtful writer stands out. It is a thought-provoking read.
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cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“ Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

"I really like this chapbook from MiPO. Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems: first in the scent of violets, then to "Fight or Flight" and the heart's leaping, and the "Risk" with its phobias. A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."
--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Multiverse

Cheryl Snell has collaborated with her sister, Janet Snell to bring forth an astute and staggering blend of poetry, science, and art in her Multiverse collection. Cheryl probes the evolving understanding of the physical world. Mulitverse, the title, is some what of a clever winking pun. It suggests the layers in poetry relate to the layers one finds in the scientific Multiverse concept. Multiverse, in essence, is a new theory claiming there is not just one universe but several, and some Physicists now think that there may be as many as eleven dimensions co-existing at once. In Multiverse Cheryl Snell pulls the string theory from physics and applies it to poetry. With the dramatic visual accompaniment of Janet Snell’s artwork, Cheryl takes the reader on an unexpected journey through the “The Natural Order of Everything.” This first poem of the sequence begins:

“It’s a trick. The sun aims wide-eyed light/though gauze breezes to filter out the truth”

Grounding the scientific concepts in concrete imagery the dimensions of existence are “filtered.” As light and dark can be measured mathematically and quantified in physics, so too can poetry measure light and dark in an attempt to quantify the affects of both. In her first poem, Cheryl attempts to “filter” out the truth of the light and the dark by using the metaphor of the predator the prey. She finds that words alone can fathom only part as she states, in conclusion, “I see there is no help for any of this/ I may as well start over.”

In trying to grasp the elusive meaning of nature and ones place in the natural world, Cheryl also explores relationships and the layers within those relationships. In her poem “Thermodynamics of Cooking Stone” she expresses the friction of co-existing as individuals in the binding construct of marriage. Rather then ending in a black hole she gives the reader a more hopeful image of togetherness:

“They’ll begin to satellite each other like shepherd moons/herding the rocks of Saturn’s rings/ around the low blue hum of heaven.”

The imagery Cheryl uses throughout this collection is startling and evocative. For example, in “Fight or Flight” Cheryl dares to tread the oft trod path of the “heart.” I have to say I approached the poem with prejudice having not read a poem, no, not one contemporary poem, with the word “heart” in it that I would say I felt was a successful poem. This poem, in my view, succeeds. Turns of phrase such as: “The tongue, stiff as road-kill…it also let’s the heart believe it can leap through the throat to freedom,” rejuvenates the bleeding heart cliché’ and turns it into something new.

On the intellectual side of things, one can see the influence of the concepts of physics in her poetry. In “Flicker Vertigo” she references the beginning of the universe and man’s attempt to comprehend his experience within this universe. She concludes with the mind bending statement “The brain fills in what’s missing, the blanks/ between light and light, a corrugated sky hanging over the theater’s false ceiling.” The impression of reality being a “corrugated sky hanging over a false ceiling” leaves me wondering what reality is. If the brain creates the missing blanks is this life a “false theatre,” a creation in our mind, or is the “false theatre” the existence outside of the mind? Cheryl’s collection is if full of such constructs which provoke exploration and discovery.

As a whole, Mulitiverse is a collection that satisfies both the intellectual and spiritual aspects of poetry. Cheryl Snell uses language with sensitivity and an intelligence that is as refreshing as it is profound.

---Mel Huber ”

cherylsnell wrote this review Thursday, April 30, 2009. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“ 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. ”

cherylsnell wrote this review Saturday, July 4, 2009. ( reply | permalink )