Review: Cully's poetry explores the grim side of life | Western Herald

Taylor Larson
Staff Reporter

Hailing from the bone-dry deserts of Arizona, Barbara Cully writes poems that piece together like a patchwork quilt, enveloping listeners with their raw passion and feeling.

Hers are poems which dig deep, poems that writhe and contort under the weight of their subject matter. They are poems written with an honest, weary voice, read by the poet herself March 6 as part of the Gwen Frostic Reading Series.

?It?s not opening a vein and bleeding,? Cully said of writing poetry. ?It comes from a world.?

That world is Cully?s own. Consisting mostly of elegies, Cully?s poems are highly developed piecemeal, insightful rumination on past experiences and places.

There is a reason for the somber tone: when Cully was 15, she experienced the death of her 24-year-old cousin, Dirk, an experience which greatly shaped her writing style and voice, the very reason she began to write poetry in the first place.

In her account of dealing with Dirk?s death from snakebite, she blends a bit of humor to the grim subject matter by adding her cousin?s words upon entering the hospital??Don?t blame the snake.?

There are many of these small touches throughout her pieces?a subtle use of humor, pointed observation, and grim truth of reality?which add to her insightful, sorrowful tone and style.

Cully touches upon Dirk?s death in later works, a return to that moment which made such an impact on the rest of her life.

Cully read raw, gritty excerpts from Shoreline Series, one of her published works, where narrator takes us to the seaside not for pleasant, lighthearted reflection, but to dig deep into our psyches, questioning what is important, musing on ones place in the world and the slow, steady pass of time.

Grim reflections on life?s occurrences, human oddities and relationships are common throughout Cully?s work, creating a slight sense of uneasiness within the listener.

Shoreline Series offers an intimate glimpse into Cully?s resting place, her spot by the sea, and an insider?s view into her own thoughts and feelings through the use of vivid imagery and insightful musing.

?It was like a puzzle, and quite interesting,? said Elizabeth Shore, a WMU Freshman who attended the reading. ?I liked how she used her descriptions in the poetry.?

Cully attributes her unique style to an interest in the visual arts.

?For a long time, poems didn?t come from reading,? said Cully. ?They came from visual arts. I consider myself to be a visual artist.?

The arts continued to provide basis for Cully?s work as she read her poem Interior Detail, a piece written during a visit to an art gallery.

Cully, digging deeper into the displayed paintings? real meaning, describes the canvases as ?miniature essays?, each brushstroke telling a story, while expressive language conveys love and pain in an almost visual format.

The artistic inspiration develops further with Cully?s collaboration with a friend for a University of Arizona art exhibit, entitled Be Mine. The collaboration includes a poem written by the two friends, as well as a series of photographs that Cully then had printed, chopped up, and made into puzzles. In the poem Straw on Canvas, Cully wonders whether art can be torture, unfinished dialogue.

In it, she combines inspiration from a gallery with her own experience, spinning images into words?a perfect meeting of the two mediums.

Cully doesn?t just gain inspiration from traditional pen and pencil works, however. The poem, Taken Once, takes its inspiration from the tale of ancient Sabine woman, who were abducted by Roman soldiers and combines it with the smoky voice of Nina Simone.

Here, Cully tries her hand at free-form poetry, breaking away from the somber tone and repetition of verse to create something truly lyrical and unique.

With the influence of Simone, the result is strange, corrupted verse, a lyrical burble of free-form, unstructured wordplay, confused yet cohesive, representative of the chaos and terror of the event.

Cully expertly blends words and phrases together to create a piece which reads like nonsense while? managing to still fit within the bounds of the tone and topic she had originally set?no easy feat.

Taken Once was a departure from Cully?s usual work, and a sampling of her broad range.

Cully completed her set with the reading of Interior Detail,? then, after a brief question and answer session, held a book signing at the back of the room for the many? who had bought or purchased one of her publications.

For Cully, one of the most gratifying things about being a poet is seeing a stack of her published work for sale at the reading, nestled in a cardboard box, or on bookshelves across the country.

?It?s reassurance that writing is not just a one-off,? said Cully.

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Posted by njstrehl on Apr 8 2012. Filed under A & E, Breaking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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