Skullwise Cat

BECOMING LYLA DORE, by Teri
Youmans Grimm!
(Red Hen Press)
ISBN: 9781597093224
Reviewer: Cindy Hochman
Poetry is, inherently, full of paradox. For instance, a poet can choose to unleash a deluge
of personal information in the confessional mode, or, conversely, step into the mind and
body of another (persona). Becoming Lyla Dore, whose central character is a fictional
silent movie star with a closetful of skeletons housed amid her red stiletto heels, falls
squarely in the latter category, and Teri Youmans Grimm’s account is as ambitious and
seductive as Lyla Dore herself. With poems that unfold as grandly as scenes from the
acclaimed films of yesteryear, the poet offers the reader a front-row VIP seat to the
juiciest kind of guilty pleasure: a world of stardust dreams, of glamour and glitz, and, of
course, the lurid underpinnings that often accompany these chimerical trappings. And
because this poet has fashioned such a plausible portrait of a flawed and fragile
temptress, the poems move easily from the reel to the real.
The Soubrette Takes Center Stage
—Photoplay, May, 1921
In her first major role Lyla Dore will further
prove to her fans why she’s a star on the rise.
Those eyes! That hair! Those gams!
This ingenue was not discovered on a stool at Schwab’s Drugstore. As Minerva sprung
from the head of Zeus, the mythical Lyla Dore, whose surname seems to have been
culled from the engraver Gustave Doré, the illustrator of Lord Byron, and whose given
name brings to mind Delilah, Samson’s downfall, was invented out of whole cloth, or