The 28 poems in Laura Read's wry, perceptive fourth collection, The Serious World, engage with the works of women writers who inspire her, including Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and especially poet Sylvia Plath.
Read (But She Is Also Jane) builds her portraits through allusion, biographical information, occasional direct address (e.g., two poems entitled "Dear Sylvia"), and quotation from the authors' work. "Oh Sylvia, I wish you would have lived,/ but I do admire your self-expression," the poet confesses. Whether their life experiences run in parallel or diverge, Read considers Plath a cherished literary ancestor. As the poet navigates midlife, parenting, depression, and the male gaze, she hopes to follow in Plath's footsteps by choosing rebellion over conformity. Even so, she acknowledges an irony: "Sylvia, I don't think we would have liked each other// in Real Life."
"Appearance vs. Reality" is "the theme for every story," Read's high school English teacher said, and it's a frequent trope here, along with the question of how to conceive of the past. Beauvoir depicted childhood as a universal tragedy, whereas Read makes of it a basis for compassion: "I'll say, Oh, you're a child! I was one once!// And the way I am now may or may not be my fault!" Of Duras, Read writes, "I need Marguerite because I need someone// with whom to grow old." For Reed, Duras's very name embodies her (pleasingly alliterative) traits, "obdurate and durable."
Channeling feminist role models, these droll poems find dignity in the everyday. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader, and blogger at Bookish Beck