Red Trousseau

by Carol Muske-Dukes, Carol Muske-Dukes

Carol Muske has been called one of the best poets of her generation. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Carolyn Kizer, commented that her technical dazzle and virtuosity are "one of a kind: Mozartian." The poems in her new collection, Red Trousseau, use Los Angeles as a symbol for the seduction of appearances; in the title poem, reality crosses from the Wallace Stevens notion of the sun "hovering in its guise of impatient tribunal" to a director's reshooting of a tarnished sunset, so that "the scene, infinite, rebegins." In Carol Muske's work, red, blue, and yellow dominate, serving to link such disparate things as a soundstage's fake prie dieu, a precinct station map of gang activity, and a schoolgirl's model of the planets, all of which take on the red of Salem burnings, the self-immolation of a political dissident in Prague, and Eros itself, moving like a red shadow over the body of love. Fate in Red Trousseau is drawn by a biochemist as a chemical, recodable spiral inside us, looping back and forth like a mobius of DNA or a movie reel; like a director or a lover, a rebeginning. Muske's Hollywood, also deriving much of its spiraling energy from another modernist, Marianne Moore, circles around its version of reality, infinitely rebeginning, until it becomes wholly the form. Life is made into an object - beautiful, but no longer life. Until, of course, the writer begins a new story, spiraling around a new apprehension of the world that is dangerous, political, and most of all, erotic. Stylistically brilliant and emotionally resonant, the poems in Red Trousseau display the work of a master poet at the peak of her craft.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 1993

About the author

Carol Muske-Dukes (born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1945) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and professor, and the former poet laureate of California (2008–2011). Her most recent book of poetry, Sparrow (Random House, 2003), chronicling the love and loss of Muske-Dukes’ late husband, actor David Dukes, was a National Book Award finalist.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Muske (now Muske-Dukes) has a great eye for poetic subjects--a woman sunbathing on a pleasure yacht juxtaposed with the buildup of American military power in preparation for the First Gulf War, a group of grade school students on a field trip at a city police station, or the actor stepping off stage and becoming a person, for example.

The poems have lush images and diction to match, though sometimes there are problems with vague pronouns, or an unsatisfying interplay between line and syntax. This collection also includes a few banal villanelles, and in a few places, Muske could pare down the poem to get to the emotional center in a more effective way--"My Sister Not Painting, 1990" manages to bury an amazing account of the war memories of an uncle. Also, I originally picked up this collection because of a series of "Unsent Letters" (letters in general intrigue me; even more so in poetry)--these poems didn't seem to fully examine the nature of letters, or unsent letters, nor did the four poems cohere in any obvious/meaningful way.

Three poems, though, about the nature of the actor as both person and character stood out--Muske-Dukes' late husband was the actor David Dukes. "Now the hero wipes off his make-up/ at the lighted mirror and he is you," the speaker in "M. Butterfly" says. "I watch them killing my husband," she says in "Unsent Letter 4," setting up themes that reappear in her later collection, Sparrow.

[Mills College Library]

811.54 M9878r 1993