The title poem in Rebecca Morgan Frank’s The Spokes of Venus considers astronomer Percival Lowell, who mistook the reflection of his own veined eye in a telescope’s eyepiece for canals on the planet’s surface. This entanglement of subject with object, beholder with beheld, is at the heart of Frank’s new book. If “Everything before us/looks like life,” how do we separate what’s faithful to a common reality from distortions imposed upon it? How do we look at art, that faithful imposition, and how do we regard the artist?
Frank’s sideways approaches to the painters, sculptors, readers and viewers that pack her poems surprise the reader at every turn. “On Making” transforms a shuddering jackhammer into a metaphor for the artist’s struggle with her materials, as she wonders “…if Sisyphus had imagined/a garden where the rock came from.” “Everybody’s A Picasso” begins with the surgeons whose grafts recreate a “cheek, the scalp, the nose,” recasting them as artists who relocate “parts of the body” to “necessary service.” Then comes a confession of surreal alterations: “I’ve had my eye transferred/to my chin so I can read the fine print./My foot moved next to my ear so I can hear myself walking/home at night.” The poem turns again, becoming a wistful love poem: “I am waiting/for the kind of love…/wielded by one who will put all my parts back/where they belong./One who listens to my own/footsteps for me. Who lends me his eyes.” The poem’s delicious meld of science, art, wit, velocity, and deep feeling compressed into16 lines is a sure-footed example of Frank’s signature moves.
Frank’s poetry thrives in the magical, blurry spaces where one thing morphs into another. In “What Is Left Here,” lovers become artist and model, the speaker both subject and object: “you made me pose,/sculpted a rusted wire shadow of me. Sometimes// I saw you watching her while kissing me.” The twittering machine in “Women, Bird, Stars” is first the perch where “a bird comes to rest,” then also a bird: “I pucker up//and flap” and “hop like a bird.” But the subject/speaker of the poem can’t escape being framed as a gendered object: “I try to jump up, be light, but he/has drawn my hips too heavy.” The ceremonial staff in “The Chief of Staff” rots as “a leader…long untouched/in his council’s circle, never hears anything./The people, meanwhile, are speaking in tongues,/making their own gold code. Breaking the rod.” In The Spokes of Venus, Rebecca Morgan Frank ably conjures the quicksilver nature love, art, and politics, all moving at the speed of light.