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Voices
in Italian Americana: A
Literary and Cultural Review
Vol. 9, Fall 1998, #2
Review by
Michael Eskin
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, England
[Julia Bolus. Circus
of Infinite Attractions. Torrington, CT: Stranger Press, 1997.
Pp. 65.]
When I first heard Julia Bolus read from Circus of Infinite Attractions
I was mesmerized: the poet's ethereal, yet firm and professionally
poised recitation combined with the stylistic simplicity, ease,
elegance, and straightforwardness of carefully wrought poetic fictions
and impersonations, which succeeded in making me forget that I was
sitting in an uncomfortable chair in the basement of Manhattan’s
Knitting Factory on a dreary fall day. Upon re-reading Circus of
Infinite Attractions almost half a year later, I was again stunned by
the imaginative idiosyncrasy and force of Julia Bolus’s poetry, by her
capacity to enthrall and intoxicate without shortchanging either
intellect or emotion in running the gamut of stock personal, social,
political, ecological, literary, etc. topoi or absconding itself into
the realms of inaccessible catachresis and abstraction.
Circus of Infinite Attractions orchestrates, among others, the voices of
such memorable characters as Bill, the ringmaster, Nina, the trapeze
girl, Eno, the illusionist, David, the lion tamer, Jorge, the flame
swallower, Pearl, the painter, Lulu, the kissing booth attendant, Iris,
the bearded lady, Carlotta and Simone, the joined twins, Estelle, the
illustrated lady, Clear Eyes, the native man, and Isabel, the fortune
teller--all of whom participate in the creation of a colorful and
condensed tableau, a kaleidoscopic arrangement of snapshots and images
of circus life, which reveals itself as a microcosm replete with all of
life¹s contradictions and complexities.
Alternating
between memoir, autobiography, meditation, and matter-of-fact
description, the sixty prose poems constituting Circus of Infinite
Attractions acquaint the reader intimately with the struggles and
aspirations, worries and desires, regrets and hopes of a remarkable
group of fictional personages, in whom he or she will undoubtedly
recognize facets of his or her own prismatically refracted and
poetically displaced existence. Nina’s observation that “there is
only so much / [she] can do without someone to catch” her, Jorge’s
memories of his parents, who “sent [him] half way around / the world
to forget their scorched throats,² Estelle¹s account of her
transformation into a “human canvas,” or Clear Eyes’ fragmented
record of his “people’s stories . . . / beaded in the
patterns of [his] buckskin” skillfully blend the singular and the
universal, thus underscoring poetry’s significance as a genre which,
as Adam Zagajewski put it, exceeds the here and now, the realm of the
merely personal.
Unmistakably suggesting their kinship with such illustrious predecessors
as Browning’s duke, monk, painter, and grammarian, and Yeats’
Robartes, Aherne, and Crazy Jane, to mention only a few, Julia
Bolus’s characters add a sizable number of unforgettable sketches and
miniatures to the motley portrait gallery of modern poetry. Julia
Bolus’s poems will, without a doubt, etch themselves into the memory
of many a reader attentive enough not to be completely overwhelmed and
taken in by the admittedly seductive and attractively marketed symphonic
blast of main-stream poetry most ostensibly embodied in the recent
Scribner anthology The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997.
Those who do not necessarily depend on anyone’s test for the
canonical, those who prefer to further spin out the metaphor Beethoven’s violin sonatas to his symphonies will, I am sure,
find the subtle and subdued chords and melodies of Circus of Infinite
Attractions to be profoundly engaging, stimulating, intriguing, and,
last but not least, simply quite beautiful. In short, Julia Bolus’s
poetry blatantly refutes A. R. Ammons’ provocation that “garbage has
to be the poem of our time.”
Michael Eskin
Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge
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