Customer Reviews

Postcards from a Summer Girl

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In C.E. Laine's new book, Postcards from a Summer Girl, the reader is asked to assemble the biography of a missing poet from a box of notes and postcards. Unblinking observations are among Ms. Laine's strengths, and in concise language and resonant images, she improvises one life's mythology.

The poet uses color like a character and space like a painter. Each color inhabits its own emotional space, drawing the reader in or distancing him, giving the poems the presence of paintings. In "Hush!"

the white room
defines memory
in syncopated time.

And in the poem "White," the speaker says

Oh, I have changed the sheets.
I keep washing them, but white
fades only into itself.

The color blue can connote bruising but in "Love Theory in Blue," a lover

would gather forget-me-nots
beneath the Danube, tuck periwinkle posies
in her hair, press his mouth against
each eyelid and call her indigo

Sensation overlaps sound with color in "What Remains," about the aftermath of a loved one's alcoholic binge:

my hand flickered-
caught a fire that raged in my arm.
The sound was light sparking
off shards of glass.

In "How it Sounds," a humiliation is a synesthetic experience:

In the third grade, bus-stop taunts pinched
my cheeks a brighter shade than marker, words
I can't recall now, only the rumble of a train
hauling coal or lumber, low and wretched
over the tight tracks laid in my throat,
as if it wanted to close like a fist.

When a character first glimpsed in "Always (notes on a refrigerator)" weaves his way through "Removing Bandages" and surfaces again in "Abalone Moon," the effect is collage-like. Ms. Laine shows us that perspective is sometimes gained at a remove, in a certain painting by Goya, in life. As the poems modulate from haiku to free-verse narratives on a range of topics, the poet mourns losses such as a shattered marriage reflected in a son's eyes, illness and death, hereditary physical weaknesses.

But Ms. Laine is not content to chronicle darkness; she also welcomes solace offered by nature and the erotics of daily life. Lovers are likened to spoons in separate drawers in one poem, compared with "perfume" in another. Lovemaking is like "Making Colors" in a third. "How I Say Soul in a Poem" conjures up this sense-memory:

It's a million absent colors;
the way my hand remembers
being held

Flying and falling are motifs established and returned to, as in the Pushcart Prize nominated "Windblown," where the speaker says

I have scattered
myself over terrain that looks
different from this altitude.

"On Metaphysics," the poet observes

I interviewed the air and then
the ground; their descriptions
were consistent with my own.
Radar data has nothing to do with this.

This collection is the third full length offering by C.E. Laine, and one that deepens with each reading.