Diane Seuss's Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl Reviewed at The Rumpus

Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf, 2018) by Diane Seuss is reviewed by Anne Graue for The Rumpus. "These poems are so full of meaning that to try to describe them feels futile, as if descriptions might defuse their glow and remove the reader’s potential to discover each piece for themselves," writes Graue. More:

There are, however, significant aspects that are worth mentioning. “Self-Portrait with Double Helix” coils through memory making connections to past and present in remembrance of someone who sends the speaker on a search for meaning and dreaming of…

[…] a spiral staircase made of the white-blue stuff of stars,
the whole thing spinning at an even pace as if automated, not so much
a staircase as a coiled ladder, and on each rung a soul, miniscule, giving off
a dull glow like a lit cigarette far down the street during a power outage.

The vision of the soul being a dim light barely visible adds an intensity of sorrow also present in “Self-Portrait with My Dead Looming behind Me,” a poem that creates a multilayered metaphor for the people who have passed out of the speaker’s life: “They fan behind me like the tale of a strange bird, / or like a deck of cards in the hands of a fly-by-night / magician.” Each of these poems, one in loving couplets, the other in elegiac tercets, recalls real lives and recognizes that irony is often a necessary component of grief.

Black and white details of Rembrandt’s “Still Life with Peacocks” are scattered throughout the collection, keeping us moored to meaning in the colorless minute. Glimpses of peacock features—the feathers, heads, and shadows they cast—are tokens of what is and is not present in art and in our understanding of art. In these images, and in every piece in the collection, Seuss reminds us that so much depends upon noticing.

Please find the full review at The Rumpus.