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Posts Tagged ‘Tara Betts’

Barbara Jane Reyes

Tara Betts, ‘Arc & Hue’ (Willow Books, 2009)

[Hi all, I have invited the super prolific poet and reviewer Craig Santos Perez to guest post here. Below is his review of Tara Betts's just released first collection of poems, Arc & Hue.]

Arc & Hue (Willow Books, 2009)
by Tara Betts
90 pp. $15, paper. ISBN: 978-0-9819208-7-0.
review by Craig Santos Perez

The title poem of Tara Betts’s debut collection, Arc & Hue (Willow Books, 2009), describes the speaker, her brother, and their nephew sketching on the sidewalk with the dust from colored chalk. The speaker wonders “if joy comes in small plastic / buckets” as each palm of their hands glows with “deliberate lines rubbed / away with moist and breeze.” Amidst this wonderment about the fragile presence of joy, the poem ends with the speaker noting that her nephew “will not notice how quickly arc and hue / crafted, turns to dust” (24).

Arc_and_Hue_FC_061709-01 - Copy

Throughout this debut collection, Betts sketches poignant narrative moments that highlight themes of family, home, ethnicity, violence, love, and joy. In “The Birth, Then Roses,” the speaker imagines her father standing in a hospital doorway with a bouquet of red roses during her birth. The speaker muses:

How each red silky slip of slower body must have
brushed against my mother’s face. Heavy sugar
to claim the carriage and birth,
not enough to coat pricks to come.
How the fists and philandering were unexpected.
How much sweeter it felt to hear the name
of her first child, a daughter, pulling away,
out of her, pushing a path into chaos that begins
them both.

My mother needed more than petals. (19)

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