Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by laura_sackton
Pictures Of The Floating World by Amy Lowell
This collection of poetry, published in 1919, contains some of the most wildly erotic lesbian poetry I’ve read this year. It’s split into several sections. The first two, ‘Lacquer: Prints and ‘Chinoiseries’ are, as you can probably guess from the name’s racism, collections of poems styled after both Japanese and Chinese poetic forms. I found these poems drab and strange. What is this white woman doing writing poems about Japanese history?
I do think it is interesting and worthwhile to read books like this—not to excuse the racism, but because I’ve been thinking about how we use language and what language signifies, no matter where/when/what. There are all sorts of racist terms in this first part of this book, and I don’t think we can say, “well, she wasn’t trying to be racist, so it’s fine.” I also don't think we need to write her off as trash. I don’t think these poems were very good, they did not move me, they seemed like a strange experiment in form, and while there were moments where I could appreciate Lowell’s word choice and rhythm, and while there is a long tradition of using different kinds of forms—why write about emperors and places you’ve never been and history that has no meaning for you? The best poems in this section were ones about nature, that weren’t set in Japan or China and didn’t draw on that history.
The second section, ‘Planes of Personality’ is markedly different. In this, Lowell says in the introduction, are poems “deriving from everywhere and nowhere as is the case with all poetry, and needing no introduction.” It’s interesting that she states this, and I wonder, too, how obvious the blatant love poems were to her audience. There are several sections in this section. She writes about the war, John Keats, art in general, very beautifully about gardens, and in the most stunning part of the book, the part that made my heart beat faster, “Two Speak Together” an incredible sequences of gorgeous lesbian love poems.
These poems are vivid, full of deeply erotic imagery, often of gardens, flowers, and nature. They are blatant, passionate, sometimes wildly dramatic, sometimes softly romantic.
“Why are you not here to overpower me with your
tense and urgent love?”
She’s constantly comparing her lover to a garden:
“When I think of you, Beloved,
I see a smooth and stately garden
With parterres of gold and crimson tulips
And bursting lilac leaves.”
She also often compares her love to Venus,and she is constantly pining for her when she’s away, always looking and searching, bemoaning that writing letters is not enough, that she longs to “kneel instantly at your feet.”
There is no mistaking these poems for what they are. It is absurdly obvious that she is writing about a woman, and that this love is sexual and romantic.
“You stand between the cedars and the green sprunces,
Brilliantly naked
And I think:
What are you,
A gem under sunlight?
A poised spear?
A jade cup?”
And do not try to tell me this is not a poem about sex:
The Weather-Cock Points South
I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind.
White flower,
Flower of wax, of jade, of unstreaked agate;
Flower with surfaces of ice,
With shadows faintly crimson.
Where in all the garden is there such a flower?
The stars crowd through the lilac leaves
To look at you.
The low moon brightens you with silver.
The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swaying wind.
“Until you stood up like a white flower”? Sex. I found myself getting heated reading this, and I’ve been thinking about why. I mean, there is something beautiful and also hot about this woman who is constantly describing her lover as a plant, who seems to always place her beloved in the garden, in the wild, outside, in these natural places. It feels poignant to me because it denotes queerness as natural, and also because women are so often compared by men to these beautiful things, and there is something rougher and truer about it here. But also, is it simply because it thrills me that this woman from over 100 years ago was writing so blatantly about queer sex?
There is so much domestic ordinary love here too. There’s one poem where the speaker wakes in the night and reaches out to find her lover in the bed, and when she realizes she is alone, she can’t go back to sleep. In another, “A Spring of Rosemary” the speaker writes about how much she loves her lover’s hands doing ordinary everyday things. I love this quiet quiet poem, which is full of Mary Oliver to me:
“Until you stood up like a white flower”? Sex. I found myself getting heated reading this, and I’ve been thinking about why. I mean, there is something beautiful and also hot about this woman who is constantly describing her lover as a plant, who seems to always place her beloved in the garden, in the wild, outside, in these natural places. It feels poignant to me because it denotes queerness as natural, and also because women are so often compared by men to these beautiful things, and there is something rougher and truer about it here. But also, is it simply because it thrills me that this woman from over 100 years ago was writing so blatantly about queer sex?
There is so much domestic ordinary love here too. There’s one poem where the speaker wakes in the night and reaches out to find her lover in the bed, and when she realizes she is alone, she can’t go back to sleep. In another, “A Spring of Rosemary” the speaker writes about how much she loves her lover’s hands doing ordinary everyday things. I love this quiet quiet poem, which is full of Mary Oliver to me:
A Decade
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
In another poignant poem, “Penumbra” she imagines her own death, and what it will be like for her lover, alone in the house, with her dogs, the table where she wrote, the furniture she touched, but no longer there to comfort her beloved. Perhaps this is another reason the poems feel so vivid and sexy to me, because even though the lover doesn’t speak back it is very obvious that she’s writing about a long shared life.
In another poignant poem, “Penumbra” she imagines her own death, and what it will be like for her lover, alone in the house, with her dogs, the table where she wrote, the furniture she touched, but no longer there to comfort her beloved. Perhaps this is another reason the poems feel so vivid and sexy to me, because even though the lover doesn’t speak back it is very obvious that she’s writing about a long shared life.
The rest of the book is less explicit and covers lots of things. Gardens, of course, but also city streets, visits to bookshops, pets, books, and a sequence of poems about the war and its horrors. I liked it better than the first section but they did not light me up.
I loved reading the edition my library sent to me from 1929, and I loved thinking about this lesbian living her life 100 years ago. The whole book is not exceptional, but the love poems are. It made me think a lot about who we’re writing to and for. Did she imagine I'd be the one reading this? And also what it means to read the past both generously and critically, what it means to try to understand someone both in their context and in our context, when all we have is their words. I enjoyed reading the whole collection, which gave me a sense of the messiness of this person, but the love poems will stay with me.