"Drawing from Memory"
Written by Hazel Frankel
Published by: Cinnamon Press
ISBN-13: 978-1-905614-28-8
Reviewed by: Moira Richards
Genre: Fiction
I was drawn immediately to 'Drawing from Memory' by the vibrancy of the 'Red Painting' that is its cover. The book's first pages reveal that the author is an artist adept with both words and with paint and indeed, many of the poems in it allude to or comment on well-known pieces of visual art. Ekphrastic poetry is the term I'm looking for. I don't know much about paintings and sculpture so with this book in one hand and google's search box at the fingertips of the other, I called up images to accompany my reading of some of Hazel Frankel's poetry.
In this way I discovered Edward Hopper's paintings of young women through a series of short poems collected under the title, 'A Sestet of Edward Hopper Women'. They're rather delicate, rather wistful women and Frankel describes each picture, points out details as the guide in a gallery might do. And then the narrations end on a wry note of commentary that suddenly casts the whole picture into a newly shaded light. For example, the description of a couple in a 'Room in New York' ends with the two lines,
Together, they are enclosed by the window frame.
The closed door stands between them.
(Room in New York, p31)
Similarly, the details of Hopper's portrait of a young woman sitting, barely dressed, on a bed and gazing out of an open window is copied by Frankel's words until the last few which observe in chilling conclusion,
She cocoons her arms.
around her drawn up legs,
pinned forever to the bed.
( (Morning Sun, p26)
And in her poem, 'Declining Female Nude', Hazel Frankel reaches behind the candid gaze and into the persona of the model in Edouard Manet's painting of a reclining young woman. With her satiric words she paints instead, the woman's brain and her contempt for the artist who does not wish to see or know it.
I enjoyed too, learning how to look at sculpture accompanied by Hazel's 'Marble, Paper, Stone' that in three stanzas, describes and compares the lovers in art pieces by Rodin, Klimt and Brancusi. Hazel Frankel does not only include ekphrastic poems in her 'Drawing from Memory' — she writes on many other subjects and themes — but those were the ones that gave me the most pleasure, that opened widest, doors for me to things I'd not before seen.