Over the years I’ve become a bit jaded about blurbs. Usually, someone I don’t know writes breathlessly about how this book is gonna change the world. So, reading that Grace Bauer is immensely witty, has rare power, and produces fresh and often startling imagery didn’t exactly move me. I admit that while Terese Svoboda’s punchy:
“The bad boys inside good girls’ hurrah Bauer’s new book where a crucifix bonks Mom on the head and ‘the road to ruin looks scenic’” enticed me, her admonishment: You lucky reader, you made me think to myself, I’ll be the judge of That.
By now you are probably onto the fact that I have been convinced of Bauer’s wit and astute ear, as in “No Such Thing As an Easy Answer” (Retreats and Recognitions), with its list of forty-eight lines that traces deliciously an arc of experience many of us will recognize, beginning: “Is this seat taken? / Do you come here often? /Can I buy you a drink?” and then: “Want to dance the next slow one? / Is that dress legal? / So you’re a poet, huh?” to: “Want to read some of my poems? / Do you type?” and beyond.
Or the way she plays with the word day in “Aubade”:
That kind of day.
One for turning the past over. Like compost.
Day for licking salt from your wounds. (You have many.)
Day for discovering the joy of dirty window panes.
Day to play music loud. And to hell with the neighbors —
They don’t like opera. They don’t like R&B.
They don’t like soul. Or folk. And you like it all.
Day for getting what you like — any and every which way
you can get it.
Day for going barefoot
Or for wearing fuck-me shoes around the house.
In some poems, Bauer transforms the mundane, carrying you off to the mystical moment and then gently returning you to the here and now, but changed. “Normal by Mistake” begins with a rider who has gotten on the wrong bus because she was distracted by two punk lovers necking: “. . . Across the aisle a man clutched a Lion King / lunch box against his Big Red parka, / argued fiercely with someone the rest of us / could not see . . . .” She rides for blocks, “before it dawned on me / that I’d taken the Normal by mistake. . . . And I, having little choice sat back / and pondered the road I had taken /or been taken by.” She rides the full circuit and finds a bus that looks just like the one she took:
This time I checked to be sure it would take me
where I thought I had been going — home —
just one block north of South — a destination
that makes as much, or little, sense
as any, once you’ve realized you are always
arriving, though also along for the ride.
I had the pleasure of discovering the far-ranging and multi-faceted qualities of Bauer’s work when I received both the Beholding Eye and Retreats and Recognitions at the same time. She moves with competence and ease from a daughter’s world view to the reflections of an aging boomer professor (and I can say that because I am one too), moving from a formal voice to a freewheeling delight in the sounds of words and then dazzles us, in the Beholding Eye, with more ruminations on culture and class, power and identity, using artist and writers and their works as launching points. Meet here Artemesia Gentileschi, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keefe, Edward Hopper, looking at their own work; or Marcel Duchamp meeting Andy Warhol. Bauer works her magic, inviting us to look again, listen again, and differently, to both the works and their echoes in our lives. (From the blurbs you will learn that these are ekphrastic poems, but not to worry. They are delicious adventures, and ekphrastic means only that two artists are at work — the original artist and the responding artist.)
“The Eye of the Beholder, after Diane Arbus,” — the poem that lends its title to the collection — is, for me, the key to Bauer’s intentions: “All human beauty is / an aberration, a mirror / trick drawing us / into itself. Into what is not.”
Try to picture yourself
beyond denial. Run your hands
across your average face,
your normal body. And tell me
how you differ from these
miracles that always make you
want to look away.
There are poems in both these collections that do not quite get off the ground, poems that seem too consciously involved in the practice of language or intellect to serve their subjects well, but they are far outweighed by the successes produced by the funny, intelligent eye that Bauer turns on everyone and everything. Plunge in, prepare for an exhilarating ride, you lucky reader, you.
— Erika Butler