A POET’S ARTFUL RIFF ON MEMORY
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl Diane Seuss Graywolf Press: 120 pp., $16 paper
Diane Seuss’ fourth book of poems, “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl,” is anything but still. This collection showcases a poet who is writing some of the most animated and complex poetry today. The book, which takes its title from Rembrandt’s 17th century painting, explores seeing and the speaker’s gaze on that particular painting (and other paintings). However, ultimately, the paintings become ways to refract the speaker’s life and experiences and an exploration of the dynamism of stillness. What’s most magical, though, is watching Seuss take things and experiences apart and attempt to re-tie the fragments together into new wholes.
The book begins with a poem titled “I Have Lived My Whole Life in a Painting Called ‘Paradise’ ”: “with the milkweeds splitting at the seams emancipating their seeds/that were once packed in their pods like the wings and hollow bones/of a damp bird held too tightly in a green hand.” The book ends with a poem, “I Climbed Out of the Painting Called ‘Paradise’ ” with the final lines of the poem referencing a father’s illness and early death: ...and the milkweeds, their mysterious seam like the smile of Mona Lisa with milk on her lips, how they opened and their seeds were carried on the wind like ships made of feathers, and Father, wearing a back brace, who would not be getting well and who could no longer work or play or lift me into his arms, and I went running toward it, all of it. I wanted my mother, and this is why I
left Paradise. by the end of the book, the speaker (and the reader) realizes that running toward the past and leaving the past are ultimately the same thing.
“Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl” follows Seuss’ prior book, “Four-Legged Girl” (2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Both collections use something seen to expand the possibilities of language, the speaker’s own life and mind, the reader and our culture at large.
Seuss, a professor at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, divides “Still Life” into 13 sections, all brief. Each begins with an image related to Rembrandt’s painting — the folded hands of the girl in the painting, a feather, a bowl of fruit, a dead peacock’s face with its open eyes. Some poems within each section riff off of these visual fragments. Only until the final section do we see Rembrandt’s full painting: The girl gazes longingly at two dead and contorted peacocks, one hanging upside down from a wall and another on its side, nearly upside down with blood pooling from its body. The book is a depiction of process versus product, an “improvisation,” as Seuss calls it, as