A House Bathed in Blue Light

Suzanne Richardson Harvey’s book of poetry, A Tiara for the Twentieth Century (Fithian Press), is delicately written and lovingly given. She writes with the voice of a mother who has seen her children face pain and sorrow. While reading her poems, I feel connected to her. I appreciate her work, and I recognize that all good poetry tries to “sweep the floor of one’s soul clean,” while perhaps, bringing to light the things which have dirtied that floor.

Harvey creates new and interesting pictures with her poems. I accept these pictures as gifts. For instance, the clever woman in “The Perfect Matador,” “knew when to face the bull/At the instant when he’d paw.” In “Elegy,” “Memory is an importunate guest/ Arriving uninvited/ Laden with dubious baggage.” In “Marketing Fear,” we are enticed with, “How about a trip to hell this season?” The poet is aptly renamed “a giant eye.” The bulimic woman’s stomach is “a starved heart” that is “emptied daily with a finger tip.” The anorexic figure is “a sheet of cellophane.” And addressed to photographer Diane Arbus: “the camera (is a tool that) can abet the lie/ Or lay bare the wound of truth.”

Harvey writes for women, her sons, the aging, and the diseased. She tells that one son was “trying so hard, too hard/ To carve out his place” in the world. We have all committed this; relaxation and acceptance are habits of the wise. To her “Favorite Son,” “the magic of silence speaks.” With age, I think, silence becomes more attractive. “The Harp at Birth,” the book’s profound opening poem, celebrates the woman’s body. For from her womb comes life. “You (the woman) are the leaven/ Who will knead this loaf/ Into the bread of life.”

Much like a novel, the pages are purposefully arranged. One is meant to read them in the order that they are given. I thoroughly enjoyed my read, and I have learned that Harvey is my sister. Reading Harvey’s book, I feel proud to be a woman.

{Review by Melanie M. Eyth}