Spring 2022, Volume 32

Diamonds by Camille Guthrie
    BOA Editions, 2021

       Review by Bill Neumire

I’d like to spend a day walking an art gallery with Camille Guthrie, listening to her thoughts and her poetry voice, which is funny and sincere and conflicted. She uses this voice to confront the personal crises that afflict her speaker. In an interview with Telly Halkias, Guthrie, who is the author of three previous books of poetry (Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois [Subpress, 2013], In Captivity [Subpress, 2006], and The Master Thief  [Subpress, 2000]) said, “I thought that a midlife crisis was a joke that only men went through and subsequently bought expensive cars, but I was quite wrong.” The sharply wielded humor involved in many of these poems, which often joke, mock, parody–but then turn inwardly concerned in lines like “My marriage is over and my youth is gone” is so convincingly human. It’s a lonely, self-critical voice that shows a strength within vulnerability, and the honesty of wanting companionship even while defiantly absorbing failure and abandonment. The poems are expressed within a tension between desire for helpful companionship and a distrustful distaste for men and patriarchy. “One of my intentions for Diamonds,” Guthrie said in another interview with Makenna Goodman, “was to write in many tones (...) like stand-up (...) inflate and deflate poetic rhetoric (...) humorous and subversive.” Noting her role as Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College and the influence of teaching on her work, she continued, “In the classroom, I try to approach texts with humility and openness, yet in my poems, I approach with questions and sass. Flirtatiously.” Indeed, what I adore most about this book is that questioning and sass, like the best combination of flavors, that at once insists in a play on Hamlet’s hyperbolic metaphor, ““Marriage’s a prison / Then is the whole world one,” yet in the same space doesn’t bullshit the reader with the dishonesty of not wanting or missing a loving relationship, as in the title poem ’Diamonds’:

I want someone to perform love on me
Any kind of love any kind of role I don’t care
but I want the real thing Real Love
To be a prisoner of Love, the songs say
and to perform all the sex acts, too
I want a masterful performance of that
with repeat performances
           Who’s there?

I love that hurt question at the end, a question that hints that this book is a catalog of honest worry–“I’m afraid / of being left with nothing for my future”-and self-critique, the speaker decrying in ‘During the Middle Ages’:

O God I am so fat
I cry all the time
(...)
Nobody wants to lick my neck
Nobody wants to hold my hand at the doctor’s office
(...)
Where are you handsome? Are you
Driving in your car to come visit me

But at the same time, it’s in this torn, unasked-for, de-coupled state that new paths and revelations occur: “Ah me! I find myself middle-aged divorced lost / In the forest dark of my failures mortgage & slack breasts / It’s hard to admit no one wants to do me anymore.” This becomes a more nuanced understanding of who (or what) is absent: “What I want is someone, not a husband / To perform the male gender around my house”--articulated later as a desire for someone to stack wood, be in bed for winter, fix a garage door. This transforms into a strength as the speaker turns to her inspirations, and even puts on Sylvia Plath’s prom dress, conjuring her to ask, “Where are we going now, Plath? / What shall I do with your prom queen power?”, asserting later that “This Dorothy makes her own tornado.” In her loneliness, she leans on a history of feminine fortitude to propel herself forward:

I need the perfect form now
To wear to this meeting today
To finalize the end of my marriage
I need all the power of the history of femininity
The indignation of every wife ever

In one of the shrewd complications of this collection, the missing male lover is a feature of want but also an indication of privilege pointing to what’s missing for the speaker and what is there and plentiful all at once. What’s missing is apparent right away, but the woe-is-me voice turns on itself as the speaker begins considering–triggered by her reflection on medieval paintings–how bad women must have had it in the Middle Ages (a grand playfulness with her own middle age, as well as the mid-way Dante scene): “You know you’d be sweating in a wheat field at twenty-two / dying from your tenth pregnancy by the bailiff.” Her medieval counterpart, in ‘A Young Daughter of the Picts’, reports that she gained, “In a swap--boar jerky for a vision--the witch warned me things / to come: Christianity, Colonialism, Cops, Capitalism. A sad, / terrible future,” and is finally advised by herself to “find a worthy pirate. Birth a new nation.” The Middle Ages is a place of perspective to temper the speaker’s self-pity as many of these poems de-nostalgia the long past, noting how much it must have sucked to live in medieval times as a woman. Guthrie, in the Goodman interview,  said, “I have a habit of mind to think that things could always be worse when they are bad. Humor is one personal and poetic strategy—an affect, a tone—that provides another perspective. It’s relief from pain.”

Down the corridor of another subplot, Diamonds conveys an experience rife with interactions with art and poetry, comparisons that do not depart but resonate and echo. She turns desperately to art and artists for advice, as when she asks H.D. what to do, or imagines Keats as her boyfriend. She said, later in the Halkias interview, “what I’m often doing in my poems, which are usually in response to another poet or artist [is] building a shrine of words (...) I do love to write poems about paintings. My previous book was about the art and life of Louise Bourgeois, and I often teach courses about Ekphrasis, a literary genre which is often characterized by ambivalence: the attraction to a visual image and the frustration with it being silent. I approach writing about paintings as a conversation, with questions. (...) My guess is that these poems are my wishes to be a painter.” And painters we see as she tells us of her reaction to Rembrandt in ‘Family Collection’:

To me he says that life is utterly disappointing
Even if you are fucking Rembrandt
So you may as well read a good book
And for crying out loud
Be precise about whatever you do

This is poetry about poetry--it even has a poem in sections with each section addressing a poetry movement. And the art, the poetry reminds the speaker in her doldrums that

The sea level rises idealism falls
And ruthless ideologies abound
Put your head down
We have serious work to do

What are we left with after the pining “for endowed and generous lovers with lots of time,” the self-criticizing perspective, the inspiration from art and poetry? Privileged and bereft, Guthrie’s speaker grasps around her and finds plenty to despair over but also plenty to value and hold–art, language, her own power that is capable of love and recognizing human need, capable of living in hurt while holding privilege and perspective in mind. And the humor never leaves her side, that oldest of coping mechanisms holds her throughout this journey through the second circle of hell, the landscape that begs the questions, “How do I make it in this cold hard land? / Tell me, where is the treasure buried? / What’s the song I have to sing to myself?”.

 

 

About the Author:

Camille Guthrie is the author of three books of poetry: Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois (Subpress, 2013), In Captivity (Subpress, 2006), and The Master Thief (Subpress, 2000). Her poems have appeared in such journals as At Length, Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Poem-A-Day, and Tin House, as well as in several anthologies including the Best of American Poetry 2019 & 2020 (Scribner) and Art & Artists: Poems (Everyman’s Library). Guthrie has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and the Yaddo Foundation. She received her MFA from Brown University and her BA in English Literature from Vassar College. The Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College, she lives in rural Vermont with her two children.

 

Diamonds by Camille Guthrie
published by: BOA Editions Ltd. (October 5, 2021)
ISBN-10 : 1950774457
ISBN-13 : 978-1950774456