Love Prodigal
Brimhall’s Love Prodigal presents her flayed heart from wounds inflicted during a divorce with poetic verse that will linger like a perfume of the ethereal realm. From her poem, “The Etymology of a Kiss,” “I’ve resisted love the way violets resist a perfumer, refused to give in as easily as roses run at the first scent of trouble, peeling off my pillowcase before heading for the door. But my nose is amorous and guilty. In some languages, the etymology of a kiss is to smell, to get close enough to nuzzle the soft or scratch a lover’s neck.”
A reluctance to be vulnerable to love is a fear shared by most of us. Does the path lead to exaltation or to destruction, this is the gamble people pursue. Brimhall is the author of five books of poetry and is current poet laureate of Kansas. She writes with daring and dazzling descriptions of intimacies real and surreal. It is recommended you read this verse within your inner sanctum. This line is from her title piece, “Love Prodigal,” “I make love when I am bored. That’s how I know I’m an intelligent animal.” How refreshing to reframe sex and/or the concept of making love as an antidote to boredom instead of something elegiac. And how pragmatic, ergo, I have some time on my hands and here is an activity that can fill the void.
Even her titles are memorizing; “The Book of the Dead,” “Quiescent,” “Refugia,” “Matraphobia,” and “Lacrimosa” all call to the reader. “The Book of the Dead” is about the tedium of small talk in the twilight of a failed relationship. “Quiescent” speaks to patience, a necessary and often painfully slow requirement for transformation. “Refugia,” to find refuge after a storm, to locate your place of calm to wait it out. “Matrophobia” evokes fears of becoming our mothers, to age, to acquire those characteristics we heretofore found irritating. “Lacrimosa” describes crying in a manner beatific of a Raphael painting.
Brimhall’s daring in “The End of Girlhood” evokes the danger and thrill of the tearing of the virginal hymen. She ascribes, “I am still myself after, but a new grief opened inside me like an umbrella.” For this piece I can appreciate how many teenage girls would want to read this work. For there is nothing more intimate than poetry to describe humanity. People are afraid of poetry because of how it might make them feel. Feelings can shatter us. Feelings are hard to master. Feeling, the dull blade than can eviscerate at the right angle.
“Diary of Fires: A Crown of Prose Sonnets,” is a masterwork with so much to unpack from the loss of the Columbia space shuttle, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex, the story of the mythical phoenix, to the tortures of chemotherapy. Her verse takes us on an experience which is so contemporary and mythical simultaneously. This segment of Love Prodigal would be wonderful material for a college class.
Of course, a book about love must have something of the act and her well-chosen words in “Aubade with a Confederacy of Daisies” is a riveting description of orgasm. Perfect reading for women post-breakup.
In “Body, Remember,” she mesmerizes the reader with the most beautiful metaphor of the spiritual resurrection that a new love brings. After all, who among us would not like a resurrection while still in this life, albeit a bit more weathered? Highly recommended as the perfect read on vacation or bedside to inform your dreams.