Poet Bridget Lowe (Photo by Jennifer Wetzel courtesy the author)
The publication of Bridget Lowe’s debut collection, At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013), is a bit of a full-circle moment for Gwarlingo.
Bridget Lowe was one of the first Gwarlingo Sunday Poets, back in the early days when the Sunday Poem feature was limited to a single poem. Bridget’s “In My Study of Hysteria,” which is included in her new book, was a runaway success (for both Gwarlingo and poetry) and also my first hint that the audience for quality poetry might be bigger than suspected.
Lowe’s collection reminds me of why I decided to expand the Sunday Poem from a single poem to a single book (or group of poems by a single author). It’s only when reading a selection of poems by an author that we begin to get a sense of an author’s uniqueness—of his or her voice and preoccupations.
Eugène Druet. Photograph of Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky in the Danse Siamoise in Les Orientales posed outside in Paris, 1910. Nijinksy’s ability to perform seemingly gravity-defying leaps was legendary. (Photo courtesy the Roger Pryor Dodge Collection, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts)
I’ve never encountered poetry quite like this. The uniqueness of Lowe’s voice is in full evidence when At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky is read as a whole. Like poet Caitlin Doyle (another hugely popular Gwarlingo poet), Lowe has the ability to create an alternate reality of sorts through language, whimsy, and pure inventiveness. Her use of personae in these poems, combined with her audaciousness and empathy, is highly original. Reading the poems of both Lowe and Doyle is like watching Cocteau’s black and white classic Beauty and the Beast, or in their darker moments, perhaps a film by the Brothers Quay. The experience is strange, haunting, and not entirely comfortable.
Lowe creates lyrics and elegies from material as disparate as science, history, and pop culture. The poems in At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky feel simultaneously contemporary and very 19th cen