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Blue Rose

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Carol Muske-Dukes
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Paperback
$18.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books
On sale Apr 03, 2018 | 80 Pages | 9780143131250
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A new collection of emotionally rich, issue-oriented poems from an award-winning poet whose work “has long been essential reading” (Jorie Graham)

 
Carol Muske-Dukes has won acclaim for poetry that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and lyrical intensity.  The poems in her new collection, Blue Rose, navigate around the idea of the unattainable – the elusive nature of poetry, of knowledge, of the fact that we know so little of the lives of others, of the world in which we live.  Some poems respond to matters of women, birth, and the struggle for reproductive rights, or to issues like gun control and climate change, while others draw inspiration from the lives of women who persisted outside of convention, in poetry, art, science:  the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the scientist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, and the Californian poet and writer Ina Coolbrith, the first poet laureate ever appointed in America.  
Requiem for a Requiem
 
                    — Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1876-1907
 
Shaking shame from her brush, she presses
it to canvas. Before her, women could not
paint women naked. Before her, women
could not gaze into the mirror of their flesh.
 
Still lines erasing taboo: spite-green goblet,
halved fruit. The women staring, bare. Or
nursing unclothed, eyes on the artist’s eyes.
                                               Without shame: a style.
 
She haunts her friend, Rilke, from beyond
the grave she predicted for herself, days past
giving birth. For years: refused that death
 
warrant. Near the art colony, she reinvents
her solitude. Glass held up to query an angle,
bootlegged light in a doorway. Bootlegged:
 
a daughter’s open eyes. Clichés of haunt: Paris
ateliers, Cézanne’s oranges, fractured Picasso
nudes. Knowing what they knew. Saw how
 
style derives from itself: how a body idealized
by desire floats in trees, vanishes in clouds.
Never to laugh, pick up a kid, bleed. She picks
 
up a kid, bleeds. Leaving Rilke’s portrait un-
done. Drifting now into his “Requiem,”
writ for her: “friend,” this shadow body. He
 
beckons now into candlelight. She listens
to her own breath, dying. So like each
gasp at the start. Says: Did you know Death
 
cheers at each conception? as Love looks to her
in the mirror: sweet murder. Chance-
implacable is the enthroned soul, but she rises on
 
each brushstroke. Deathless, her way
to unveil a woman’s body. But “Schande!” she cries,
her dying word, holding her newborn daughter to her
 
breast. Shame! Soul, come claim the body.
Copyright © 2018 by Carol Muske-Dukes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her 1997 collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A poet, critical essayist, and fiction author, she lives in Los Angeles. View titles by Carol Muske-Dukes

About

A new collection of emotionally rich, issue-oriented poems from an award-winning poet whose work “has long been essential reading” (Jorie Graham)

 
Carol Muske-Dukes has won acclaim for poetry that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and lyrical intensity.  The poems in her new collection, Blue Rose, navigate around the idea of the unattainable – the elusive nature of poetry, of knowledge, of the fact that we know so little of the lives of others, of the world in which we live.  Some poems respond to matters of women, birth, and the struggle for reproductive rights, or to issues like gun control and climate change, while others draw inspiration from the lives of women who persisted outside of convention, in poetry, art, science:  the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the scientist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, and the Californian poet and writer Ina Coolbrith, the first poet laureate ever appointed in America.  

Excerpt

Requiem for a Requiem
 
                    — Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1876-1907
 
Shaking shame from her brush, she presses
it to canvas. Before her, women could not
paint women naked. Before her, women
could not gaze into the mirror of their flesh.
 
Still lines erasing taboo: spite-green goblet,
halved fruit. The women staring, bare. Or
nursing unclothed, eyes on the artist’s eyes.
                                               Without shame: a style.
 
She haunts her friend, Rilke, from beyond
the grave she predicted for herself, days past
giving birth. For years: refused that death
 
warrant. Near the art colony, she reinvents
her solitude. Glass held up to query an angle,
bootlegged light in a doorway. Bootlegged:
 
a daughter’s open eyes. Clichés of haunt: Paris
ateliers, Cézanne’s oranges, fractured Picasso
nudes. Knowing what they knew. Saw how
 
style derives from itself: how a body idealized
by desire floats in trees, vanishes in clouds.
Never to laugh, pick up a kid, bleed. She picks
 
up a kid, bleeds. Leaving Rilke’s portrait un-
done. Drifting now into his “Requiem,”
writ for her: “friend,” this shadow body. He
 
beckons now into candlelight. She listens
to her own breath, dying. So like each
gasp at the start. Says: Did you know Death
 
cheers at each conception? as Love looks to her
in the mirror: sweet murder. Chance-
implacable is the enthroned soul, but she rises on
 
each brushstroke. Deathless, her way
to unveil a woman’s body. But “Schande!” she cries,
her dying word, holding her newborn daughter to her
 
breast. Shame! Soul, come claim the body.
Copyright © 2018 by Carol Muske-Dukes. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Author

Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her 1997 collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A poet, critical essayist, and fiction author, she lives in Los Angeles. View titles by Carol Muske-Dukes

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