Jacqueline St. Joan and Karen DeGroot Carter do great reviews of THE FOUR FACES OF EVE, Poems by BOYLE, GRANVILLE, PERKINS and WALDSTEIN
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Grit and Grace Fuel
The Four Faces of Eve
Anthology From Colorado-Based
Mad Women's Poetry Society
(Constance E. Boyle, Brooke Granville,
Petra Perkins, Gail Waldstein)
Review by Karen DeGroot Carter
Published in Hooked on Books, January 2, 2025
In their award-winning¹ poetry collection, The Four Faces of Eve, four Colorado poets — Constance E. Boyle, Petra Perkins, Brooke Granville, and Gail Waldstein, all in their 70s and 80s — pull no punches as they explore the myriad dimensions of their lives.
As members of their self-named Mad Women’s Poetry Society for many years, Boyle, Perkins, Granville, and Waldstein have mastered the art of supporting each other through the trials and tribulations they’ve faced not only as mature women but as writers plumbing the depths of their often-devastating life experiences in their very personal and powerful poetry.
Each of these poets is not only prolific but widely published, and their diverse personal and professional backgrounds contribute to the varied insights they provide. While painful universal themes such as abuse, betrayal, and loss are explored throughout the pages of The Four Faces of Eve, Boyle, Perkins, Granville and Waldstein offer unique takes and insights on those themes, making this multidimensional collection all the more compelling. And despite their despair at times, they also infuse many of their poems with the joy they’ve experienced as women in love, women as mothers, women as their own persons armed with what they need to not only survive in their lives but flourish as artists.
Often set in locales that resonate, from Puget Sound to Jones Beach, or in the homes of “Jersey Nana” or “Oklahoma Grandma” (Boyle 32), these poems are peppered with memorable images of larkspurs and cardinals; log cabins and pottery; familiar celestial objects as well as nature made celestial. Floating and even walking on water, flights and migrations, fears and refractions, regrets and remembrances are woven through The Four Faces of Eve alongside rings of truth as well as joy over what once was and wistfulness over what might have been.
Resilience, ownership, self-preservation, and pride also sit side by side with the unmentionables not only mentioned but declared for all to see and hear by Boyle, Perkins, Granville, and Waldstein. The power of desire and upending of ecstasy, selves lost in moments of joy as much as in moments of desperation and at times complete unmooring…all this is trumpeted unabashedly despite what “polite” society so often insists women — and especially women of a certain age — should keep to themselves.
Spirals and crashes; failings of the mind and body; ruminations on people and things cherished, lost, and now honored are interspersed with turns such as “hopelessness in hand” (Granville 17) and at times even edged with humor to brighten the unbearable…or celebrate the simplicities of a “ginger curl” (Waldstein 54) or the hope inherent in sustenance shared. Grief fades only to return throughout these reflections on everything from sexual abuse to spirituality—taking the breath away in some. At the end of “Retreating,” the response Perkins poses to the question “How can I believe / I alone am tormented?” (Perkins 96) strikes me as a helpful instant remedy whenever the world seems too much to take.
Through The Four Faces of Eve, Boyle, Perkins, Granville, and Waldstein not only document the seemingly unbearable affronts, injuries, and tragedies women still somehow bear and not only survive but share their life stories in ways that can help others who might see themselves reflected in these pages. At the same time, these four poets encourage others to not only survive whatever fate delivers to them — and from — but to create art along the way…for their own sake and for the sake of the art that helps sustain them.
1 The Four Faces of Eve was first runner-up for poetry in the 2024 William Faulkner — William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition sponsored annually by The Pirate’s Alley Society, Inc, a non-profit literary and educational organization based in New Orleans.
The Four Faces of Eve: A Tribute to Survival
Review by Jacqueline St. Joan
The faces of the four women on the cover of this book provide the kind of uncertain welcome you might feel when knocking at a stranger’s door. Will you find inside an enigmatic smile perhaps, or a piercing, soft eye? A silent, distracted glance, or an explosive rage? I tell you that if you open this door, you will find inside real women experiencing real life—its common yet particular pains and its impossible challenges, its saving graces and those losses that always win in the end. Do not let this warning deter you. Indeed, facing harsh realities with language to meet the task is one of poetry’s insistent promises. No faking, no backing off, no happy endings required.
The themes of this collection include: love, motherhood, grief and spirit. These ideas may bear different names in the poems themselves, and they could easily have been categorized as honesty, beauty, devastation, and openness. This is a coherent, well-structured collection of free verse. Here I will offer samples of what I mean, not judgment. We’ve all had enough of that.
Here there are moments of joyful precision that fall from Constance Boyle’s lines about the child she is birthing in her poem, “passage”:
cranial bones slide over one
another in silent overlap
eyelids wrinkle two walnuts
tightly closed
And in “bipolar II,” she provides a sneak peek into that special kind of cyclic mind and the breathing which living with it requires:
today on the phone speeding
through words a friend hears me
laugh long
blackboard scratches
I hang up calm down notice
how I blurted grandstanding
soloist drowning the tenor
Enter the Amour chapter, welcomed by the contradictory and true- to-life Petra Perkins who celebrates the joys life offers—even in the driveway.
You stand waving
your big heart at me
like a flag
above your silver head.
And we are so happy for the two of them…until the Resilience chapter where “In the Closet” complicates our reaction by describing the “addiction game” the two had played for years “before sobriety.”
He is bellowing now as he
stomps through every room
kitchen bedrooms basement office
garage he sees my car
he goes outside comes back in
“Where the hell are you, honey?”
he’s at the closet door
he flings it open
he only calls me ‘honey’ when drunk
I am shaking I hold tight
Brooke Granville, in the chapter on Death/Grief, uses imagery of the horn that announces death's
triumph, intoning the brass of devastation in this short poem, titled "the oh of suicide":
not the sympathetic oh
of accident or the elder’s death
not the oh dropped voice
constant note
but sliding down the tongue
circled lips trumpet of pity
his car running in the garage
your body broken by cement
her handgun in the tub
the oh no
Last, but certainly not least, in this poetic mural is Gail Waldstein, who laces her life of love and its loss with the bodies of dead children in the pathology lab where she worked, and with the split personality and guilt burden required of “working mothers.” Waldstein can turn a phrase, ignite a metaphor, create something new in all categories, whether it be acknowledging her daughter’s vision, or recalling the peak of love, or the struggles with mental illness, or the autopsy of a young woman.
Motherhood:
my daughter says
empty vases are sad
Amour:
…………………we swim
in water so green
our skin grows eyes
Resilience:
forty years ago labeled paranoid schizophrenic Thorazine silence
mind empty as the moon
Death/Grief:
I sliced
eight micra sections
peeled tumor off the blade with a
fine, sable brush lifted each piece
delicate as lingerie
I speak for Colorado when I say we see the weathered faces on the cover of this book of poems because these poets have faced the sunshine, the rain and the freezing cold of life. We treasure this wall of women we may not know, yet we feel we do know them. They are our Eve, the source of all life, who eat the forbidden fruit, take God’s consequences and live to tell us about it.