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Poetry chapbook by Diana RaabPlain View Press, 2008
Review by Rebecah Pulsifer
. . . . .Dedicated to the introspective diarist Anaïs Nin, Diana Raab’s Dear Anaïs captures with painstaking precision brief autobiographical snapshots of the poet’s own life. Memories heavy with the speaker’s relationship to her parents, drugs, death, and men vie for primacy in this warm collage, which utilizes a stark—almost journalistic—narrative style. The speaker’s reflections are sometimes unexpected and always highly personal, cataloging in relentless detail her skating lessons as a child, a road trip to Woodstock, and afternoon walks with an admired lover. At its best, Dear Anaïs offers a chiseled look into the making of a woman. The book’s opening poem, “Klein’s,” captures a surprising bluntness that Raab tames persistently with her photo-like images and glaring syntax. The poem is a rich description of the New York City of the speaker’s childhood:. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...until nighttime when we mount
. . . . . . . . . . . . . the same train back to our quiet
. . . . . . . . . . . . . neighborhood in Queens where the loudest
. . . . . . . . . . . . . sound you’ll hear is a cat crying in the
. . . . . . . . . . . . . dead of a hot summer night.
. . . . .The danger in this type of ruthlessly direct writing is that at times it wavers between honesty and flatness. In lines like “I hate how horses make me feel,” or “I live to write / so I shall not die,” the speaker’s dedication to detail and self-reflection becomes like a room without a door: the poem collapses into darkness; the reader gropes for a place to exist in a wash of literal language. Ultimately, Raab’s homage to Nin resonates with an unparsed honesty that offers a complete and unsparing story of a life. Dear Anaïs is a gift of complete admiration from one writer to another.
Rebecah Pulsifer is the Associate Editor of OT!M.
