Customer Reviews

Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe (CSU Poetry Series)

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The reader is simultaneously illuminated by darkness and light when reading Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe. With sobriety, irony, sarcasm, humor, and sorrow, Stone skillfully carries us through universal themes: love and its absence, the arts, family and solitude, mortality and the body, and the inexorability of the dark. Each poem is an intricate labyrinth of phrases and rhythms, which entice the reader who hangs over the edge of meaning. "A shadow elongates/ and slips through the gate, a foreigner/ with no meat on its bones." (p. 30)

Dissonant rhythms, irregular syntax, and unusual vocabulary awaken dormant places lying deep within us. Verbal contrasts and evocative rhythms mesmerize, unsettle, captivate, and hypnotize. Soft, gentle words, like "a shadow elongates" combined with abrupt, sharp-angled phrases like "febrile ruckus" show us that Stone is an accomplished master of juxtapositions. The author has complete control of her universe of words which aim towards a vanishing point of solitude. Magnetic phrases draw us towards each poem's center-centers which often lead us to life's edges. Each word, a prop on the poem's stage, is placed to release precise ambiguity of meaning. Her enigmatic titles, "Emissary Shadow," "Sun in an Empty Room," and "The Art of Crackage" are as mysterious as they are precise.

Stone constructs an exotic poetic scaffolding of elaborate phrases infused with darkness. Taking us to the boundaries of the human condition, to "the vacated events we make myths of" (p. 44), her language to describe the dark is paradoxically bright and invigorating. Her title poem, "Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe" is a carnival of language dancing over darkness. Some 400 years ago, Flemish artist, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, whom Stone invokes, mastered such combinations of revelry and death in his apocalyptic paintings.

As vibrancy and laughter share center stage with solitude and darkness in Stone's poetry, words, at the edge of life's nothing, summon life's everything. Readers who enter this rich, textural cafe of poems will delight in the multiple layers of meaning that continue to resonate when the poetry ends.

My favorite section of Sandra Stone's COCKTAILS WITH BRUEGHEL AT THE MUSEUM CAFE is the eponymous one in which the poet focuses on such famous artists, writers, and musicians as Giacometti, Kafka, Rilke, and Stravinsky. In one such poem ("Dickinson, Bishop, and Stein"), Stone asks, "How often does the simple subject / confound our simple grasp?" Certainly the best poems in Stone's volume deliver such subjects indelibly so that her reader is neither confounded nor confused. And every look outward, in the hands of this writer, is also a look inward, providing us with a deep sense of ourselves. This is exactly the kind of resonance I hope for in a volume of poems.