Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released: Collected and New Poems 1974-2011

by Barbara Chase-Riboud

The long breath of Barbara Chase-Riboud's poems recalls poets of the antique world we know only from fragments, like Sappho. And yet here is a disquieting and sumptuous contemporary voice that seems to gather up antiquity and modernity with equal fervor and scorn. These poems are sexually charged, possessed of a courtly disdain and a strange nobility that seems to well up from below to be self-creating and unlike the verse of any other poet writing today.

Certainly one secret to this work is that Chase-Riboud's poems are informed by her epic, polished bronze sculptures, as her sculptures are informed by her narrative fiction, and her fiction by her poems. The idea of the Renaissance Man is almost a cliché, but how often do we get to see what it means for an artist to be a Renaissance Woman? Chase-Riboud has been a major in sculpture, fiction, and poetry for close to half a selling over a million copies of her path-breaking novel  Sally Hemings  in the late '70s, winning the Carl Sandburg Award for her second collection of poems in the late '80s, and now, nearly thirty years later, on the heels of a major retrospective of her sculpture at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Berkeley Art Museum, here is  Everytime a Knot is Undone, a God is Released , her first new and collected volume of verse.

Genres: Poetry

400 pages, Hardcover

First published October 14, 2014

About the author

An American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist, perhaps best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation of women.

Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, Sally Hemings, in 1979. The novel has been described as the "first full blown imagining" of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson.[1] In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman and sold more than one million copies in hardcover.[2] She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award.[1] In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution.[3] In 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.[4] She divides her time between Paris and Rome.

The only child of Vivian May Chase, a histology technician and Charles Edward Chase, a contractor.[5] Chase-Riboud displayed an early talent for the arts and began attending the Fleisher Art Memorial School at the age of 8. She also excelled as an art student at the Philadelphia High School for Girls (now combined with Central High School). Between 1947 and 1954, she continued her training at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and won an award from Seventeen for one of her prints, which was subsequently purchased by the Museum of Modern Art.[5] Chase-Riboud went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Tyler School at Temple University in 1957. In that same year, she won a John Hay Whitney fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome for 12 months. There, she created her first bronze sculptures and exhibited her work at the Spoleto Festival in 1957, as well as at the American Academy and the Gallery L'Obeliso the following year.[6] During this time, she traveled to Egypt, where she discovered non-European art.[6] In 1960, Chase-Riboud completed a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University.

After completing her studies, Chase-Riboud moved to Paris.

Reviews

[GP · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the things I love about poetry is the ability it has to craft startlingly vivid imagery within the confines of the poetic structure. Well done poetry is sharp, with a clarity of vision using words. After reading from Everytime a Knot is Undone, it struck me that Barbara Chase-Riboud was doing something very different from modern poetry. Instead of creating the brief word pictures of modern works, this was instead the sort of craftwork of a logos edifice. It felt more akin to the long form epic poems of history. This is a great work. It transcends short illusions, with a conversation between the two lovers who play out their passions to the inevitable ends and the Plutarch; our chorus who closes the curtain for each act. It's an intriguing book, misleadingly slight in pages, but hefty words to feed your soul. Take your time through this one, it's worth it.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will continue to be reading and thinking about these powerful poems. I want to sit with them like Zen koans. I am sort of surprised I've never heard of her, and I think I will be reading more of her work.

[Sadifura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must confess that, prior to finding this in e-book form by chance on Libby, that I had not heard of Barbara Chase-Riboud, nor have I known about her extensive contributions to literature, art, and poetry. I had not known that she was as widely traveled as many of the poems in the collection has evidenced her to be (in fact, a lot of the poems, I figured, were intriguing works of poetic, historical fiction, such as from the perspective of two Maoists in a troubled marriage, the Chinese princess in the Jade court, or the lush poems about Egypt that frequently featured in her poems, including Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, which was one of my favorites; indeed, Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra is still what I believe to be one of the most beautiful historical fiction takes I've read on Pharaoh Cleopatra, but with biographical details later in the poem that I originally believed to be a cipher of sorts for all women to be a stand-in for Chase-Riboud herself). I had not known that she knew Mark Rothko, Anna Akhmatova, or other figures of importance to the art and poetry world. I hadn't heard of her at all. But, once I read this poetry collection, I found in her poems that, at once, show a radicalism and an at once fresh and scathing view of White US American imperialism and racism (particularly antiblackness), as well as French imperialism (and particularly antiblackness), sexuality, sensuality, gender, womanhood (God, I loved the poem Caster Semenya's Ovaries as someone with some sort of hormonal issue that doctors can't diagnose despite not having hyperandrogenism like Semenya and instead possibly hypoestrogenism due to my symptoms as a whole; despite not being a binary woman or a woman at all except in the context of queer womanhood and bisexual nonbinary womahood in addition to manhood and mostly being pretty much void of gender, that poem made me feel like I wasn't a freak or a monster for a body that I've been bullied for having all my life, albeit a body that's made significant changes throughout childhood to adulthood), religion, Alzheimer's, death, familial dynamics, immigration, and relationships in particular that I couldn't stop reading for month and three days I had read this collection. Her poetry is delphic and incisive at once: you can read a line of any of her poetry and simply the way a single line reads will hang on you for ages. Her sense of imagery is impeccable, using vocabulary words that I haven't even known as someone who prides themselves on their strong vocabulary that adds, not detracts, from the broad image and theme the poems are making. Her grasp of different points of view, different types of experiences, different human beings, her empathy, is one of her strongest suits in this collection: she can go from the point of view of an impoverished Somali Muslim immigrant father to Pharaoh Cleopatra to a Chinese woman in an imperial palace to a Maoist couple in the midst of a divorce to a someone dying of kidney failure (what I read "Emily Dickinson" to be about) to an androgynous entity to people in the apocalypse in Greece to an Australian man trying to save his Laotian wife, and she treats all of her varied subjects with such a loving kindness that she can convince you she could've been any of these people at any point of history. Now that I've found her, I'm both sad that I haven't read her before and glad that I now have.

[Liam Miles · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[☾ Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone needs to read some poetry once in awhile! I may have gotten real emotional when i read some pieces.