Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis. Intaglio. Kent State Press, 2006

Review by Lesley Jenike

This morning I noticed my husband had left his copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Complete Poems open on my desk and the poem waiting patiently to be read again, obviously enough, was “One Art.” I was immediately reminded of the many awkward moments spent asking students to explicate what at first seems so plain, so obvious: the odd, childlike tone of resignation; the cold comfort of that repetition. Loss isn’t a new theme. It has wracked the pages of poetry collections for centuries but its elevation to the status of “art” in Sophia Kartsonis’ Intaglio and Bishop’s “One Art” somehow justifies the pain. Just as Elizabeth Bishop tells us in “One Art, loss is its own discipline.

Whatever hold “One Art” continues to have on its readers, Sophia Kartsonis’ Intaglio also has in spades, though the real joy of Kartsonis’ work is not a Bishop-like, sensible acquiescence, but its unshakable reliance on the very human capacity to love. It will not go gently. There’s a preference for what is carefully, artfully wrought—though of course Kartsonis argues that we are wrought from pain and sometimes the process is ugly. The poems, however, are beautiful and they never assume despair; they’re too in love with the world and when despair inevitably comes it’s met with humor, grace, and a ferocious intelligence. Intaglio suggests (as does Bishop) that suffering embosses us, raises us up, gives us a modus operandi for survival, makes us beautiful—a Christian notion Kartsonis deftly modernizes by praising the poems’ speakers and addressees for the unique ways in which they tackle their suffering—with an eye for the extraordinary beauty in the ordinary, a desire for connection and communication, and an unabashed belief in love.

Such qualities may seem overly sincere in an otherwise frenetic, ironic twenty-first century, yet the sincerity with which these poems feel is too raw to deny. In fact, the poems’ speakers often find themselves marginalized because of their sincerity, scattered like jewels among the ineffectual and disingenuous rituals we so often use to disguise our real and potentially dangerous feelings. But I hate the word feelings. It refuses to adequately explain the kind of throaty plea we hear in the opening poem “Caravansary:” “If the issue at hand is love/then batter my heart you three-faced dog” (3). Obviously the issue is love, its gain and its loss, but here Kartsonis defers to that great singer of physical and spiritual love, Donne, who, as glorious masochist, asks God to destroy him so he might be remade. Oddly enough, Kartsonis’ speaker has remade God in the image of a circus freak—anything, anything to make her feel anything amid the most horrible of horrors: “thin niceties/served up on water crackers and brie” (3). What for Donne was a very real, spiritual request for physical and divine usurpation, becomes for Bishop, centuries later, a practiced “art,” and, finally for Kartsonis, an engraving that, as Eleanor Wilner suggests in the book’s forward, “creates the negative space which raises the figure in relief, presents it to sight and touch.” So while Bishop may give us the rules of the game, Kartsonis shows us how the game is played, from generation to generation and from the old world to the new—all in high relief.

What’s so wonderful about Intaglio is its suggestion that loss can shape family, perception, and, in a way, become a common bond between the otherwise disconnected and dispossessed. Kartsonis chose to organize her book in three sections, the last of which includes, oddly enough, poems about and in the voice of Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva and her daughter Ariadna Efron. The choice, however, is not at all odd when we consider the kinds of very tangible losses both women experienced and how, remarkably, their voices manage to cross time and space, illuminating the speaker’s own sense of disillusionment:

Eyelashes encoding beloveds—all those ridiculous poems

collecting lashes like cosmic debris,

like cinders, like that;

the lashes his, the heart yours,

that was said to be too large

or too small depending on the weather,

or how you washed it

down. I understand. From here, where even

the trees are dropping limbs

on any willing surface and languishing,

I’ve a lashy boy of my own, and words by the kilo,

and they serve me like they served you,

with bent knees and filmy blades of resentment.

but I don’t let up. Like trees

we’ll lay it all down for the paper

or one hard storm or a good fringy set of eyes,

and there’s no point in being sorry for that

here on this planet with the sky forgetting us

even before we’re gone (87).

The poem from which this section comes, “I Absolve You, Marina Tsvetayeva,” is a fine example of the poet’s swelling imagination, its long sentences building in dramatic tension by process of accumulation—much like Bishop’s “losing farther, losing faster.” No, the speaker will not apologize for having loved despite “this planet with the sky forgetting us even before we’re gone” (87). And I’m reminded of Bishop’s parenthetical command to “Write it,” for despite art’s obvious shortcomings, we still “lay it all down for the paper/or one hard storm/or a good fringy set of eyes” (87).

The first section seems particularly interested in the ways loss can affect a family’s collective memory. “Vanishing Armenia, ” for example, immediately introduces us to the kinds of cultural alienation the book as a whole tackles, acting as a wide-angled shot that later closes in on the particular loss of home and country we see in poems like “Epithalamium Fifty-Five Years After the Fact of Your Saddest Day:”

Yiayia, wish it so that I could take you back

to the dressing room where they pinched your cheeks,

varnished you like kindling, wrapped you

in a satin gown so white it shadowed blue

and misted you with a gossamer shroud,

made it hard to know your own face

in the thick glass mirror.

You were more a spider’s intended

than a bride, your back

a dumb length of chain

sewn in just under the skin,

each link painfully plain (16-17).

We can’t miss, of course, the painful distortion of the poem’s title and the goulish images that somehow, by their very reversal, become frighteningly appealing. The poem is, in effect, rewriting the memory to incorporate a new understanding of this wedding’s real meaning.

One of Intaglio’s remarkable accomplishments is the way in which it compounds the loss of home and the loss of lover. When the “Greek village/where Gypsies washed in the sea,/bodies and clothes,” (16) is no longer a viable option for the epithalamium’s subject, and the sky becomes “wrong,” (19), the speaker we understand to be of a later generation and American-born, appears to swallow this bitter knowledge, skewing her perceptions and, arguably, beautifying them:

Gorgeous emptiness you’ve been here all along,

aplintering off a flame-thrown night somewhere.

A red one first: a tasseled crimson pom-pom.

A green chrysanthemum spirits out then

sputters down. Then light rain strings lake to sky.

After, the kind that open like a hand,

sprinkle a slow handful of foil confetti.

Next, a gaslight crown spurts blue: volcanic

bloom, a gush of blood from a well-deep wound.

But, like the right dress, isn’t it so me

that it’s not the fireworks that move me

but the smoke after, when the night becomes

a kimono stitched in vines of used light.

I mean, a garden of them grew from nothing (29).

In “Litote, Smoke Trees, Fireworks Over Water,” the speaker prefers the negative impression left after the fireworks have dissipated and not the fireworks themselves. In other words, the sky’s alteration after those brief and violent explosions is what truly illustrates the fireworks’ transformative power.

And it’s by no mistake the speaker’s eyes are drawn upward again and again. It seems the “wrong sky” her grandmother encountered after coming to America is constantly envisioned and revisioned, perhaps as a way to turn what’s ultimately cold and distant manageable, beautiful, and finally right. So, too, do the poems often turn to birds and moths— those winged, sky-bound things—to suggest a desire for the sky’s freeing absolute. “Reconstructing a Bird,” for example, tells us: “The sky is being refurbished/a scarf of cloud here/a peach full moon there,” (55) and the bird itself is “reconstructed,” and “bedraggled yet soaring/in a hush of glass-bottle blue” (56). The heavens here are aswirl with impressionistic dazzle, yet we’re constantly reminded that some amorphous loss created such beauty: “In this one, she’s walking after rain./He’s haunting an empty warehouse,/an abandoned home./The sky is being refurbished/a scarf of cloud here/a peach full moon there/autumn dovetailing dusk” (55).

In “Hummingbird Feeder Shaped Like a Strawberry,” the speaker finds kinship with a bird the size and color “of dust.” She’d “never seen anything lovelier” (33)

I’ve been waiting too (any sweetness)

by the window, watching the feeder for a first glimpse for so long.

so that the first sighting startled me, the reverse reaction

of those who take sphinx moths for hummingbirds,

I think insect first: the body fragile and fine: a velvet bullet

between propeller wings—a frenetic stillness (32).

We get the sense, after reading Intaglio, that pain can regenerate, not simply degenerate. “Hummingbird Feeder Shaped Like a Strawberry” is representative, certainly, of the book’s great generosity of spirit, its ability to integrate interconnecting narratives with striking lyrics that sing the transformative power of pain, how it chisels us down, makes us fine.