“It begins and is never the same” (“How It Begins”) is a good way to describe Carine Topal’s gorgeous collection of poems, Bed of Want (Black Zinnias, 2008). Formally adventurous and deliciously sensual, readers will want to stay wrapped in its sheets, which are sun-dried, orchid-scented and mapped with mid-20th century routes through Europe and North Africa—places and times that whisper through the book.
The poems that begin the collection offer up delectable details like “sunflower seeds crackling in our mouths” (“Sweet Prunes”), an orchid’s “orange lip set on sepals of dark chocolate” (“Plant Sanctuary”), and the sensuality of “Eating Apples,” where
He showed her how
the skin goes first,
a gracious ripping of the fruit.
In “The Garden,” content and craft work together in lines that snap and pull like the laundry she describes:
These are the linens
embroidered towels
the sheets
clipped and hung
the beginning
of daylight, the genesis
of housekeeping
the quiet whipping
of chores
The poems eventually move beyond the domestic “two-bedroom/the radio swooning” (“The Garden”), into a larger world of mid-20th century travelers, lovers and art. This world is touched with magical realism, as in the prose poem “Twin,” whose mysterious twins are perhaps mountains that appear to carry on their shins “the small chalets of fishermen” and on top of the head, “a hummingbird house.”
Topal also engages the reader in new ways with her postcard poems. In “Postcard Tunis,” the real or imagined Matilde writes to her cousin Constance a text that seems too personal to be put down on a postcard just anyone might read, and this heightens the voyeuristic experience of the reader:
There, I hear his mouth open and he does that fretwork on my face—a cat’s cradle on skin, a man teaching a woman, who loves the heat and wind, how to touch the noon light…
The nature of the postcard form is to be brief, so the snippets they contain can be peculiar, personal and mundane, which helps create humor:
I left the champagne glasses at the foot of the stairs.
How is Henry’s back after his nasty fall?
Regards to Biscuit.
In “Postcard #2,” the salutation is simply “Dear,” the plea is “wisdom gave me/patience/but hurry to me,” and the closing, an intimate but anonymous “Darling,” leaving the reader to wonder who these real or imagined people might be and what their circumstances are on April 20, 1944, a date which brings to mind WWII and Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
