Still Life with Judas and LightningDawn Diez Willis, Still Life with Judas and Lightning
Publisher: Airlie Press
2013, 71 pages, paperback, $15
A collection of portraits: men and women’s lives fluttering, for a moment, between the pages of a book. Dawn Diez Willis’s Still Life with Judas and Lightning presents a sequence of characters with beauty and song and a great measure of quiet observation. It’s like walking through a museum and finding the gold-framed faces are more than skin-colored paint and eyelashes—each possesses a pulsing spirit hidden just behind the canvas.
In each poem Willis paints for us the beautiful and joyful moments of her characters’ lives—but only as she reveals their hidden sorrows. In “Lacy Learning Eve,” Willis describes a young girl who has just learned that Eve was taken from Adam’s rib. She compares Lacy to that rib, so young and hidden and waiting to bloom. In fact, Willis sees that hidden, secret potential as well as the secret sorrows of each of her characters, the un-named spirit lying just under the skin.
The sheer innovation of the collection’s language is alluring. In “Lacy Learning Eve,” Willis imagines Eve’s body curled inside Adam’s breast: “Near Eve’s ear, Adam’s liver / sang its pond of songs.” His liver. A pond. Singing. Willis’s poems themselves are like songs, voicing and naming the hidden and obscure...
Read the review by Laura Drell at Front Porch Journal in its entirety here.
Publisher: Airlie Press
2013, 71 pages, paperback, $15
A collection of portraits: men and women’s lives fluttering, for a moment, between the pages of a book. Dawn Diez Willis’s Still Life with Judas and Lightning presents a sequence of characters with beauty and song and a great measure of quiet observation. It’s like walking through a museum and finding the gold-framed faces are more than skin-colored paint and eyelashes—each possesses a pulsing spirit hidden just behind the canvas.
In each poem Willis paints for us the beautiful and joyful moments of her characters’ lives—but only as she reveals their hidden sorrows. In “Lacy Learning Eve,” Willis describes a young girl who has just learned that Eve was taken from Adam’s rib. She compares Lacy to that rib, so young and hidden and waiting to bloom. In fact, Willis sees that hidden, secret potential as well as the secret sorrows of each of her characters, the un-named spirit lying just under the skin.
The sheer innovation of the collection’s language is alluring. In “Lacy Learning Eve,” Willis imagines Eve’s body curled inside Adam’s breast: “Near Eve’s ear, Adam’s liver / sang its pond of songs.” His liver. A pond. Singing. Willis’s poems themselves are like songs, voicing and naming the hidden and obscure...
Read the review by Laura Drell at Front Porch Journal in its entirety here.
