The Mirror of Simple Souls
Poems by Leah Flax Barber
Theater of the Renaissance conjures like a witch at a cauldron. The Italian version is an especially rich brew—part honey, part venom—in which regional Medieval farces and the revival of Greco-Roman tragedy and comedy eventually bubbled up into the Commedia dell’arte. The Commedia began in the 1550s, and its stock characters live with us today, in everything from Rigoletto to Marvel and DC cinematic comics. This theatrical tradition finds its next iteration in Leah Flax Barber’s magical first collection of poems, The Mirror of Simple Souls.
Flax Barber’s collection fittingly takes its title from 14th century book of mysticism by Marguerite Porete. A simple soul has much to tell us, as becomes evident in the three sections of Flax Barbers’ book. The first section bears the name and legacy of the stock character Columbina, the Commedia’s young servant, whose charming persona thinly masks her practicality and intellect. Second and third sections, Cryptomnesia and Saturnalia, reflect and refract Columbina into the author’s own life—a mesmerizing hall of mirrors. The short poem, “Prologue” sets the stage for this play of art and reality, mirror and life.
Before literature and history
There was literature
There was history
It was ghost-faced
Bridled experience
And we lost what we misplaced
Your wet yellow lips
Your glass
Your poison
Poems within the section, Columbina, perfectly evoke a sunlit, shame-drenched landscape in Renaissance Italy. The theater and the street coalesce. Columbina finds herself on the outskirts of the city or in the city square, spending her mornings and afternoon in costumed rumination. She spends some time with the guileless Pedrolino, another stock character, floating in and out of comedy and veracity. Pedrolino has a painted face; he rinses it in the river. Columbina, “being an actress” touches his hand “without touching it.” Both of them, off stage, feel “fevered…with disgust.” Disgrace festers in “Infidelity,” with Columbina transferring the language of vice—never absent from the Commedia—to the wider creation of life on earth. “At the heart I know,” she says, “I have sinned” but admits ignorance about the nature of that sin. Columbina thinks. Columbina reasons. But Columbina remains a fiction. The fullness and meaning of an authentic human life elude her .
The tension of fantasy and truth in Columbina mirrors the poet’s experience in the rest of the book. The section, Cryptomnesia finds Flax Barber in a liminal state between dream and wakefulness, illusion and accurate memory. A fine example of this is the poem, “Dirty Boulevard”:
The freedom of love it astounds me
When we walk by the furniture stores
With their waterbeds as big as houses
On the dirty boulevard
Loneliness is pitiful
Freedom is my dream I always forget
The pornographic dream of a vista
In the final section, Saturnalia, the tension of unreal and real takes the form of the poet as day-dreamer. The section begins with the title poem, “The Mirror of Simple Souls,” in which a round mirror triggers Flax Barber to thoughts of Marguerite Porete’s mystical text, resolving into the sexual fantasy of “The elegant cross/Of your arms/In a sleeveless top.” The section traverses the seasons, heaven, hell, and that crucible of the daydream, the school. The tension between theatrical and actual that plagued Columbina and the poet resolves by the book’s end. Flax Barber embraces her dreams as a “heaven” that buffers the real world where we feel both pain and the pleasures of breakfast in a courtyard.
Poets who read Flax Barber’s book may well feel the urge to mimic the structure of her poems. One reason is the craft in the start and end of the poetic line. Each line of each poem in the collection is akin to a monostich; it begins with a capital letter and breaks in such a way that Flax Barber needs not a single mark of punctation. The technique is remarkable accomplished. It also lends a grace and dignity to the poems, so that the images they contain are burnished with the elegance of the Renaissance. Another reason a poet may become a copycat: the strange and sensual diction of this book. In its pages, kidskin gloves, limestone, and Babylon coexist with shit smells and black vinegar. The choice and variety of words results in poetry that sticks in the mind after the lovely white and gray volume slides into the shelf.
Flax Barber’s book helps repudiate those critics who doubt that academic study can produce poetic images. History, philosophy, and cultural criticism infuse the book: the Commedia, Porete’s ecstatic union with God, and Renaissance Humanism, with its emphasis on the complexity and freedom of humankind. Today, these are rarefied interests—increasingly so given the decimation of the humanities and language-learning across our universities. But in the right hands—Flax Barber’s hands—they do not produce a rarefied poetry. The Mirror of Simple Souls is a book much like its heroine, Columbina—intelligent, graceful, yet very down-to earth.
Editor’s note: Those interested in exploring the antecedents of this book may want to read Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (Le mirouer des simples âmes), trans.Ellen Babinsky (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1993) and Christipher Balme, Piermario Vescovo, and Daniele Vianello, eds., Commedia dell‘arte in Context (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
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