Kahlo: The World Split Open
by Linda Frank
Ottawa: Buschek Books, 2008; ISBN 978-1-894543-48-4; 101 pp., $17.50 paper.

Linda Frank has published three chapbooks: Taste the Silence; ...It Takes A Train To Cry and Orpheus Descending. Her first book-length collection, Cobalt Moon Embrace, was released in 2002 from Buschek Books. Her second, Kahlo: The World Split Open, is a poetic reflection on the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who is best known for her self-portraits. The latter was shortlisted for the 2009 Pat Lowther Award. Frank won the Bliss Carman Poetry Award in 2008 for a poem from her third collection, "Insomnie Blues," an as yet unpublished book of poetry structured on the twelve-bar blues.

For some time now, the theme of biography has ignited the imagination of poets -- possibly as a reaction to the confessional poetry inaugurated in 1959 with Robert Lowell's Life Studies. Recent examples are Mitchell Parry's Imperfect Penance, inspired by the life of Georg Trakl, Douglas Burnet Smith's Sister Prometheus: Discovering Marie Curie, and Jan Horner's Mama Dada, inspired by the life of Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, who was connected with the Dadaist movement. Linda Frank has added to this growing collection through her take-off on the life of Frida Kahlo.

Kahlo was a great painter (and married to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera), merging in her art the indigenous cultures of Mexico with the European art movements of Realism, Symbolism and Surrealism in an exuberant burst of colour. Tormented throughout her life by the pain associated with spina bifida, polio, and a bus accident in 1925 that resulted in a broken spinal column and a number of broken bones. As if that weren't enough, an iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, seriously damaging her reproductive ability. Still, she managed to create great art.

It is this creation of great art in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles that has inspired Frank. She has captured this in "I Paint My Own Reality":

because my body is the canvas
of my self and to paint myself
over and over is how
I claim it from the margins

because my broken body
is politic, history, country
love, pain, the whole world (23)

In these first two stanzas of the four that comprise this poem, Frank has captured the essence of erupture from pain, a rising of the self from the ashes of the body. She uses Kahlo as the expression of feminism--the freeing of the self from the pain and subjugation of the body into the essence of creativity. Is it through the breaks in Kahlo's body that Frank's muse rises?

She explores this idea further in 'A Parrot Screaming' where Kahlo "even on her deathbed . . . / dress / as if for a fiesta. But no festive dress / could suppress the pain."(47) The second stanza contains a rich, evocative image of this festiveness "Fringed / silk Spanish shawls and heavy pre-Columbian / necklaces." There may have been a better placed line break here, such as between 'heavy' and 'pre' or even between 'pre' and 'Columbian' but that is mere quibble to an otherwise outstanding poem. The essential nature of both Kahlo and this poem reaches out from the final stanza:

She dressed this way for Diego
and for her country but above all
she dressed to draw the eye away
from her fractured body
A parrot screaming in the jungle

Undoubtedly, there should have been a period at the end of the penultimate line. The verb 'screaming' is extremely well chosen.

In "The Frame," the title of one of Kahlo's paintings hanging in the Louvre, Frank captures Kahlo's Parisian period in the third stanza:

Miró hugs me. Kandinsky kisses me
Picasso gives me a gift of earrings, beautiful
tortoise shell hands with gold cuffs. But to Breton
and the others I am a Mexican trophy
Only a woman could embody their exotic idea
of Mexico. Patronizing bastards (51)

She speaks strongly through this feminist tone summarizing the state of art and gender. The reader by this time notices a trend. Whenever a period is called for at the end of a line it is often absent. Who knows whether this was a printer's error or something to do with an unexplained and inexplicable poetics? It is one of the few weaknesses in the collection.

Although both males and females have explored this new theme of biography, both Frank and Horner have used it as vehicles to express feminist issues as well as to express solidarity with female artists. Frank has done a particularly good job of portraying Frida Kahlo's life, capturing the pain and the joy of creation as well as the difficulties a woman had to overcome to be accepted in her own right as an artist.

John Herbert Cunningham is a Winnipeg writer. He reviews poetry in Canada for Malahat Review, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead and The Danforth Review, in the U.S. for Quarterly Conversations, Rain Taxi, Rattle, Big Bridge and Galatea Revisits, and in Australia for Jacket.

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