Customer Reviews

The Very Stuff: Poems on Color, Thread, and the Habits of Women

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I learned once from an artist that colors directly affect the emotions. If this is true, then Stephen Beal is smitten. He translated his love of the subtly shaded colors of DMC embroidery floss into poems that bring up conflicted emotions of his childhood and sexuality. Some of the emotions are painful to read about. And that is the success of this book; the poems split open a life and show you the not-so-tidy parts that make it up. I've re-read this book several times and, just like an emotion, it is never quite the same each time it is experienced. I think this book is a success as poetry and an autobiography of the most intimate kind.

The basic idea behind this collection of poems - select a series of colors of embroidery floss and write poems based on the associations the colors generate is, as far as I can see, totally new. It made for an interesting book. However, not all of the poems were to my taste (including one where the author described a, let us say, fatal Viagra moment that could result from seeing a woman in a certain dress made of red). There's a lot of extended navel-gazing in many of the poems, but then, I suppose writing one's associations about color would involve that.

I originally bought the book to use as inspiriation - thinking it could be used in teaching - read some of the poems and have students write their own based on colors they selected. Well, this might work for college students, but for younger than college, other color poems will have to suffice (...see "fatal Viagra moment" above).

However, many of the poems were enjoyable, and, as far as I can critique poetry, they were well-done poems. I think the idea is maybe a little better than the execution in this case...