Museum Pieces - Beloit Poetry Journal

BOOKS IN BRIEF
of a woman she calls Ophelia. Unlike Chmielarz, she opens with
a poem about her personal encounter with the photograph
(happily reproduced on the cover). Then we enter Ophelia’s life
and voice with a 1910 letter from New Orleans to her teacher
back home, betraying her panic at failing to find a job that
would allow her to use her education in literature and writing—
and to pass as white.
Ophelia’s letters home, in various verse forms, make up the first
half of the book, which closes with an account in Bellocq’s voice
of the relationship of a viewer to the photograph (the reader to
the poem?). The poet then imagines passages from Ophelia’s
diary—all in fourteen-line stanzas—flashes of autobiography
followed by entries on her work as a model for Bellocq as he
teaches her the art of the photographer. Like Chmielarz,
Tretheway has composed a bildungsroman about the struggles of
an artist. Except in the introductory and concluding verses, her
poems in their varied forms appear transparent: the reader gazes
right through them to Ophelia, who is candid, direct, eloquent,
but never “poetic.” The final poem in the volume, as an
afterword, envisions the actual taking of the photograph on the
cover. It ends
Imagine her a moment later—after
the flash, blinded—stepping out
of the frame, wide-eyed, into her life.
That “parting shot” may not be necessary, but it serves to remind
us that we have been watching three creative spirits at work—the
poet and her Bellocq and her Ophelia.
■
Janet Holmes, Humanophone (University of Notre Dame Press:
2001, 88 pp., 2001, $28 cloth, 0-268-03054-5; $15 paper, 0-268-
03055-3). Many musics sound through this book—whistles,
trombone, theremin, and the poet’s own verbal music. But the
weight of the volume is in two long poems. The first is the title
poem, about an instrument invented by the father of George Ives
and performed by singers, “each of whom sang a single tone, and
only/ when called upon by the music.” Though the poet remains
hidden behind her subject, she reveals her closeness to him by
composing two verbal scores for the humanophone. “Partch
Stations” documents the career of the experimental musician/
inventor Harry Partch. Although the first person in these poems
42 Beloit Poetry Journal Fall 2002