Customer Reviews

Woman in the Painting

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In this highly readable volume, Andrea Hollander Budy portrays the live of the title Woman in the Painting in four stages. We see the woman's adolescence and young womanhood, full of love, loss, and yearning. In Part II, we flash back to her mother's life, which was triumphant despite a harsh upbringing and an early death. In Part III, we see her successful father and his slow descent into dementia. Finally, in Part IV, we hear the voice of the mature woman, wise to the world as well as to herself. Anyone who likes the poetry of recent laureates Collins and Kooser will love this volume.

Andrea Hollander Budy's third book is filled with poems full of complexity that has been richly boiled down to their essences -- like a delicious bouillabaisse full of flavor, layers, and discoveries. All her books are worth reading. At first, some of the poems don't jump out at you as other poets like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver's would...yet on 2nd and 3rd readings, their deeply satisfying nature sinks into your skin as a fragrance would, transforming, perhaps, the way you saw something before -- as you would in looking at a painting, for instance.

After attending a reading featuring Andrea Hollander Budy, I decided to purchase her book of poetry "Woman in the Painting." Through both her reading, and the book, I consistently encountered three things: maturity, humility, and bravery. Her confident sense of maturity stands behind her approach to writing--she seems levelheaded, thoughtful, and informed as she explores past experiences and scenes. An observation of a squirrel and a branch sets off a string of memories in "In the Garden," and from the vantage point of time, Budy intelligently parallels the natural scene with memory. Her confidence is interwoven with a humble acknowledgment of the reality of the details of experience--she steadily examines her subject matter, and she discusses it with you calmly and insightfully. This is evident in poems discussing her mother and father, and the deeply rooted emotions and difficulties of various relationships. Perhaps the most important quality of Andrea Hollander Budy's poetry is the bravery it takes to investigate the experiences treated therein. In "Giving Birth" she describes the "immense volcanic shuddering" associated with the pain of the experience--a pain which, as Budy mentions, books on childbirth say "in time you won't even remember." She examines the lingering impact of the death of a loved-one in "Poem in October." Though the subject matter is often weighty, her writing is refreshingly light in that the reader feels a sense of clarity and precision in her voice. Although I was a bit surprised when I discovered her various treatments of sexual experiences, it felt honest and insightful. I don't hesitate to recommend Andrea Hollander Budy's poetry.

After hearing Andrea Hollander Budy read a few samples of her work I had to have more. This is shocking for me because poetry has never been my cup of tea, if I drank tea. She has a way with words that will reach your core. Her subject matter varies from the miniscule occurrences of daily life to those tragic events that will forever brand your memory. No matter what the subject however, there is a depth to every one of her poems that will teach you lessons about life, or reawaken those you have already experienced. She touches on romantic relationships. She brings up the insecurities we feel, the mistakes we make, the parts of us we attempt to alter, and the knowledge we gain through experience. She explores a lot of emotions that come with death. Her mother passes away and you endure the grieving process along the way, as well as the discoveries she makes about herself and others. You get to know people; you get to know Ms. Budy. Parts are very psychological, others very intimate, and others with emotions that are beyond description. She also has an impeccable way with imagery. In the poem entitled, "My Father's Brain" she states, "Not a house empty of its furniture but an abandoned landscape once punctuated by sunlight, freshened by rain." This explains how she feels, and

I decided to buy "Woman in the Painting" after hearing Budy read some of her poetry in person. As she read, I was impressed with the depth of feeling she captured in her writing. I ordered the book hoping the rest of her poetry would be as honest and reflective as what I had heard her read. Just a few minutes ago I finished the book and, in short, her bold style is consistent between what I heard her read and the rest of her writing. I definitely wasn't disappointed.

To be more specific, I was especially drawn in by the sensitive nature of the subjects Budy explores in her poetry. In "Woman in the Painting," her poems include a poetic biopsy of her mother's emotional pain and hidden insecurities, the awkwardness of some of her own sexual experiences, memories of her parents' declining health and deaths, her disgust with her grandfather's chauvinistic sense of entitlement, as well as a few deliberate dissections of social inequities. To help her reader understand, Budy begins most poems with a description of some inanimate object or commonplace event that we can relate to. The connections she makes between her feelings and these objects or events are startlingly precise.

I would recommend this book to anyone. The first set of poems is pretty sensual, which could be uncomfortable for some readers. Otherwise, just about any serious reader can appreciate the depth in Budy's writing and the attention she pays to the details of her own feelings.

Budy's poems are subtle works that challenge the way poetry portrays emotion--and the way people express it--by relating deep feelings to the minute, tangible details of everyday life. This dialogue between the emotional internal and the material external creates a powerful reading experience that we are fortunate to share! Budy's book is one that will resonate with readers, entering their lives quietly but leaving a marked impression.

In her collection of poems Woman in the Painting Andrea Hollander Budy paints images of tremendous happiness and pain in a way that is both deeply personal yet incredibly broad. The collection as a whole is a reflection on life, of both the joys and the sorrows brought on by extremely significant events which are interwoven with seemingly ordinary, mundane things. Each person experiences life differently, and Budy acknowledges this early on. From the beginning she explains that "we bring our own heat to the canvas" (3), expressing the idea that each individual life is unique and that no one else can experience or "paint" our lives the way that we would; however, it seems that Budy writes in a way that connects to readers by using her own life as a canvas on which to express events of tragedy and joy common to all people. Her poems about the loss of both of her parents, loss of friends, and love are personal enough that they are not our own experiences, yet they are broad enough that they speak to us just the same. For example, in "Room 246" her poem about being so young at the time of her mother's sickness convinced me to imagine myself in the same situation; while I could not relate to her exact experience, I could certainly understand it.

Budy writes clearly as a woman, reflecting on family, children, and men in her life. Her poems show both the strength and vulnerability of a young girl growing up to become a mother herself. She takes readers with her from the anxiety of exposing herself as a writer in "First Books" (9), to her "First Love," admitting "I haven't forgotten you" (16). In the next section of the collection she deals with her mother's cancer diagnosis and ultimate death, her mother's worth as a woman ("Nineteen-Thirty-Eight") and the grieving of her family("Sorrow"). In the poem "The Woman in the Painting" Budy shows that all women have a story, even if they are only in a picture; that every painting can be related to a real person. She examines the facades people put up to appear a certain way to others, explaining that the way something looks is merely an appearance not necessarily a truth.

Along with these ideas of appearances and the life of her mother, Budy writes about her father and his illness. Through his suffering she continues to examine concepts of gender relations in her life. For example she writes "I'm not sure if he cared for me more than for my brother" in "My Father's Green Flannel Shirt" (55). Her relationship with her father differs from that with her mother: a mother is someone to aspire to--someone whose traits, as a daughter, you expect to inherit; a father is someone meant to protect you, be the stability in your life. Budy's relationships with her parents seem to be like this, and as a daughter myself, I found her poems about parents quite relatable.

In class recently my professor said "Stories are framed just like pictures are framed," and it immediately reminded me of Budy's poetry. The collection unfolds into a story framed by Budy's experiences. As readers we also frame the story based on our own experiences. Just like a painting is framed, so are Budy's poems--The Woman in the Painting is full of poems unique to her own life but are also common to the lives of others. Her combination of mundane occurrences with extraordinary events, such as in "Giving Birth" where the birth of her son and a young man riding the metro are simultaneous, show how life is full of these contrasts. Budy's poems, several of which use imagery of water, remind us that, like waves of the ocean, life stops for nothing.