Green Knife
I went in
I thought of lavender
how goes it
— “Many Long Returns”
A rough lyricism goes roaming in Stella Corso’s Green Knife. The terrain: eatery, museum, concert hall, bar, computer screen, street. The dramatis personae: therapist, artists, theorists, teenagers, a beautician (no, an aesthetician), rats. And a speaker whose voice offers a salutary equanimity:
what could I say
about these men
their other friend—
they have been both kind and unkind
I have loved each of them
in my cruel memory
I love them still
It’s a tone that might derive from having reached a sort of midpoint in life, without a corresponding equilibrium in place or identity, as when the speaker observes, “And it just so happens I’m tired / of being a woman.” Since the poems are untitled, they flow into one another; an index of first lines at the end reveals which units the author regards as individual poems.
The book begins: “My therapist compares me to a style of painting,” and visual art is both subject and mode. The shaped poems labeled a painting are enclosed in spare rectangles that plate their contents on a kind of canvas. Framed works are weighed up against everyday life as art:
I wonder should I pay for art today?
already I have observed through a cut diamond
the blurred silhouette of a woman next to a stereo
Such momentary scenes share the resonance of the Seurats and Cassatts described elsewhere. And the present moment is weighed up against the past:
my friend is younger
and not for much longer
she will go on not knowing
to blame herself
Incidental encounters are related in the tenor of dreams. Stripped of soft tissue, Corso’s discontiguous lines leave space for the reader to discern connections:
the singer she wore green spoke of green
grief color of an empire
and must I become a resident
of every state I occupy however brief
Corso’s tensile structures offer a wrought ambiguity. And when the poet turns to beauty, her lines gleam: “A woman’s face is a library of mirrors.”
