Contemporary poems on the ancient past have to be ghosts. They are dragged through the inscriptions of strangers until they become something ethereal and gray. And in that spectral light, as we know, colors become brighter as if shining from rain. This is how I read these poems and find them fresh. -Fanny Howe
Martine Bellen’s fabulous new collection Ghosts! is a mosaic fable of descent and return in which a postmodern Cinderella who “likes to fuck and fuck” seeks a door for which she is emotionally the right size. It is a book of loss, in which lovers and fathers turn to ghosts and join with the winds, and also of redemption and recovery. The imagination fiercely demands to “re-member” what has been torn to pieces. Like the poet H.D., to whom she pays tribute in the beautiful first poem, Bellen displays purity, even gnosticism, of thought. The doors of passage swing both ways, into history (outward) and myth (inward), while retaining the texture of experience. Here are “transparencies before candles in a darkened room,” a negotiation of light and darkness at the very axis of consciousness. The Biblical story of Lot’s wife shows how emotionally fatal it is to gaze back at one’s disasters. The doors ahead are all open, if we will only take the courage to pass through them, charged not with regret but desire. Paul Hoover
