Book Review: Selima Hill, Red Roses

by anna battista

The cover of Selima Hill’s latest collection of poetry features a photograph of a kangaroo scratching itself: in a way, the animal looks uncannily human, while, by studying the photograph well, you’ll even detect something almost obscene about it. This cover echoes the poem ‘Terrible Things Happen in the Summer’, with its verses “Terrible things happen in hot zoos/where kangaroos scritch and scratch their tails.” While the kangaroo is just one of the animals featured or used as a metaphor in this collection, it’s men and women who are the real protagonists.

Men are just defined by the personal pronoun “they”, women by the pronoun “we”, as in the verses “They jam themselves inside our leaky thighs/like mattresses inside abandoned mini-bars/where, deep within the vales of blue snow/loneliness has built her secret palaces” (‘They Ram Themselves with Thumps Between Our Thighs’), or in the triptych formed by the poems ‘They Like to Fill Us Up’, ‘Finally They Grunt’, ‘They Go to Work’, that, in the sequence they are printed in, almost seem to follow the phases of coitus, from the climax of the male orgasm to the departure of the man who goes off to his job.

In all the poems there are vivid images: love is compared to “a bag of warm eyeballs passed from hand to hand in the dark” (‘Our Softness Is Appalling’), while women are often compared to roses, at times dying inside like withering flowers, at others soft and delicate like fresh roses.

Some of the themes of previous anthologies emerge in a few poems such as ‘Hush’ that evokes in the lines “…brush the lips and hair of sullen daughters/whose perfect man is actually a horse”, the title of the collection Portrait of My Lover as a Horse that offered disturbing but effective analogies between the lover and a series of animals.

Hill’s ability stands not only in her clever choice of words, but in juxtaposing different universes, such as reality and fantasy, reassuring and domestic places and scary and violent places, but also in her ingenious use of the anaphor, often employed not to repeat a concept, but to suggest variations on the same theme. Readers who want to venture in Selima Hill’s world must bear in mind that they will be met by an honest poet who can terrify and enchant, but who will also leave an indelible mark in their minds, hearts and consciences.

{www.bloodaxebooks.com}