Sherry Chandler

Femme au chapeau

“Rachel Dacus’s poetry is difficult…” So begins Terri Brown-Davidson’s review of Femme au chapeau (David Robert Books, 2005) in The Pedestal.

And so it does seem upon first blush. I will confess that I have had a copy of this collection for some months now. Unfortunately (for me), when I first got it, the distraction of summer, fall, holidays kept me from being able to fully engage these intricately constructed poems. But it is spring now and my reading palette cleansed by a winter of retreat into old movies and the mystery novels of John Harvey.

More light reaches my rocking chair by the window now, more light reaches my brain, and suddenly these poems unfurl for me like a banner on top of a “Midnight Carousel.” Femme au chapeau is a celebration of form: sonnets and sapphics and terzanelles. Femme au chapeau is a circus of rhyme: quatrains and couplets and terza rima. Take, for example, the pantun “Midnight Carousel” in which the rhymes run abab bcbc cdcd dede eaea – up and down go the words, around in a circle the rhymes and repetitions until the poem is a carousel, a circus of spiralling family pain:

…
A razor-winged bird, deranged
she left us by inches. Alone and broken,

she said insomnia made her camp in the den,
Her sighs tinkered our midnight dreams,
leaving us by inches alone. Broken
toys, we came apart at the seams.

Her sighs tinkered midnight. Dreams
of demented carousels spun, sweeping
up children like broken toys. She seemed
not to want to rise from sleep.

The demented carousel spun…

Dacus has internalized form to the extent that it is integral, not a corset that constrains from the outside but a skeleton on which a living thing is built. As Browne-Davidson says, “What’s so wonderful about Dacus’s formalism…is that she embraces difficulty…and makes us, as readers, chase her vision as avidly as she does.”

Dacus is a sure-footed poet, capable of considerable wit and word play within the line, what Browne-Davidson calls “sheer sonicism.” One of my favorite poems in this collection is “Ode to My Purse,” a nod surely to Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous “Complaint to his Purse.” But while Chaucer’s purse is empty, Dacus’s is as full as her life:

Open Purse, I say: swallow phone, glasses, cash.
Bring home to me, magician’s hat. I chant,
lovely Coach-crafted clutch, catch! You
soft maw, yawn to gorge and stow
my emblems. Stretch and hold the zoo
of me, the proof, spoil, and tool.

Such verbal nimbleness begs comparison to Heather McHugh. But unlike McHugh, whose poetry sometimes seems to be about her cleverness, Dacus uses her effects softly. There is less intellect, less brittle edge. Dacus works closer to the heart.

Like Monet’s great Fauvist painting, “Femme au chapeau,” Dacus uses her colors in a way that sometimes startles. Intricate, her poetry often is, but upon consideration, I can’t really call it difficult. This isn’t a collection to read at one sitting. Dacus isn’t as pellucid as Ted Kooser. Neither is she as dense and difficult as some one like Gerard Manley Hopkins. You must be alert and fully engaged to read her work. But that’s a joy in itself.

[Update: Barbara Crooker has done a much more scholarly and articulate review of the use of form in Femme au chapeau at Smartish Pace. You can read the review by following this link. Crooker picks up a lot of things I missed. Gives me a good excuse to read the collection again!]

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