The Girls with Stone Faces

by Arleen Paré

A long poem memorializing the art and lives of sculptors Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. Arleen Paré, in her first book-length poem after her Governor General Literary Award?winning Lake of Two Mountains, turns her cool, benevolent eye to the shared lives of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring, two of Canada's greatest artists, whose sculptures she comes face to face with at the National Gallery of Canada. In the guise of a curator, Paré takes us on a moving, carefully structured tour through the rooms where their work is displayed, the Gallery's walls falling away to travel in time to Chicago (where they met at art school and fell in love in the 1910s), New York, and Toronto (where they lived and worked for the next six decades). Along the way, Paré looks at fashions in art, the politics of gender, and the love that longtime proximity calls forth in us. The Girls with Stone Faces is one of the finest collections of poetry about the lives of artists - and most importantly their work - to appear in Canada in many years. Although Wyle and Loring were well known during their lifetimes, they have dropped out of common memory. Paré's collection is art loving art, women loving women, words loving shape, poetry loving stone, the curve of jaw, the trajectory of days. "? Like the sculpted female figures she describes as 'tacking their bodies against the history of storm,' Paré has positioned her own graceful, finely chiselled lines to recast the history of women in art, in society, in love." - Anita Lahey "? A distinctive and memorable book, sympathetic and gloriously questioning." - Stephanie Bolster

Genres: Poetry, Biography

104 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2017

About the author

Arleen Paré is a Canadian writer. She has published two collections of poetry and a novel to date.

Originally from Montreal, Quebec, Paré was educated in social work and adult education, and worked in social services in Vancouver, British Columbia for much of her professional career. She later left her social services job to study creative writing at the University of Victoria.

Her first book, Paper Trail, was published in 2007. A blend of poetry and prose about a businesswoman finding herself stifled by the weight of corporate bureaucracy, the book was a shortlisted nominee for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008, and won that year's City of Victoria Butler Book Award. She followed up with the novel Leaving Now in 2012.

Her 2014 poetry collection Lake of Two Mountains won the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry. [wikipedia]

Reviews

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a while since I've allowed myself the precious attention and indulgence to read a book of poetry. I am an unwavering fan of Arleen Pare's ability to command the English language; to break it down, stir it around, and put it back together in puzzle pieces -- and then to have the reader pick up the individual parts to examine up close and then step back to breathe in the entire mosaic piece. She is a masterful poet, novelist, and the images she chooses require words that grow deep into the root of whatever has taken hold of her. This poetry book, a compelling need to tell the story of two incomparable women who can no longer tell their own story, who lived their story to the fullest through their commitment to an artistic life -- this book is vital, in many ways. Pare courses blood through each line, each page, and the images that are evoked. Statues that move, if only in perception or intention; incomplete pieces of objects that come alive and, in their incompleteness, stand whole. Read these poems. Learn their stories. Breathe it all in.

[Jim Puskas · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a delightful discovery! A huge vote of thanks to the National Gallery of Canada for introducing me to this wonderful contemporary poet through her latest collection, celebrating the works and lives of "The Girls", Frances Loring and Florence Wyle: Prolific sculptors who, though celebrated in their day are now regrettably almost forgotten, their magnificent classically-inspired works now considered passé, overshadowed first by the sumptuous but often hollow behemoths of Henry Moore and more recently by the aluminum and plastic monstrosities of our day.
This collection is at once a paean to beauty, a walk in a gallery and a meditation on the unique lives of there two superbly talented women. A visit to Room A105 is definitely in order.
This is a book I will return to again and again, each poem a gem, combining extreme economy of language with a torrent of imagery -- a rare feat. Few poets since Dylan Thomas have been able to cram as many disparate images into one line.

[Dorothy Mahoney · Rating 5 out of 5]

The lives and sculptures of Florence Wyle and Frances Loring come alive in this collection of poems
by Arlene Pare. The four sections: First Rooms; Room with Rumors, Ruminations; Rooms without
enough room; and Last Rooms, detail the difficulty of housing large sculptures and the conflicts
in their lives. It is a prompt to google their names and study photos of their artwork, to celebrate
what is strong and beautiful, beginning with Pare's own poems.

[Jessie B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating