Shirley J. Brewer Wild Girls, Apprentice House Press Loyola University Maryland, 2023, 107 pages, ISBN: 978-1-62720-437-8, $14.99
Shirley Brewer’s new book, Wild Girls, is top notch in range and in colorful poetry. It has humor and seriousness. It relates the personal as well as the historical, and also the mythical. It is a book written for women, but also accessible to men. Ms. Brewer is skilled in poetic craft. Her wild girls include the historic wife of General Custer, the Cone sisters, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, Jacqueline Kennedy, Annie Glenn (wife of astronaut John Glenn), Annie Oakley, and Queen Elizabeth. She delves into the mythic in her poems about Noah’s wife, Job’s wife, Wendy of Peter Pan fame, and Queen Kong (yes, Queen Kong!). She also writes about 20th century celebrities like the Mouseketeer Annette Funicello, Mouseketeer Bonnie, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe. She enjoys after a few problems a hypothetical dinner date with Richard Gere. She unearths the stories of local and contemporary people, some celebrities for being public martyrs of a kind, like Breonna Taylor killed indiscriminately by police, Adrienne Haslet-Davis, maimed by a bomb at the Boston Marathon 2013, Sandra Bland, found hung in a jail cell in Hempstead, Texas, She also writes of relatives and friends, intimate personal stories beyond the public eye but important to a person’s life.
Shirley Brewer is first and last a poet. Every poem has her stamp of craft and vision. Here is one of my favorite poems. The poet becomes Marilyn Monroe’s cosmetics. A very clever and miraculous poem is the result.
I Am Marilyn Monroe’s Lipstick
Kiss Kiss Red in a brassy tube
Upright in her rose-perfumed bungalow
Next to rows of rainbow-hued pills.
Even if I could speak, I’d keep
Her secrets, the way her hand trembles
As she holds me close to the mirror.
Eyes half-shut, mouth an alluring oval.
She never bothers to blot my excess. I am
An enigma, a glossy magnet catching men,
Yet part of an arsenal shielding her face
From the animal world: creams, false
Lashes, pearly blue shadows, goo, mascara,
Her lacquered sword. How seamlessly
We all play together, guarding our goddess—
The portal to her complex inner realm.
Stashed inside her gold mesh purse
Before a long evening out. I know
She will use me over and over,
Wear me down, leave my raunchy imprint
On macho flesh. O night of beasts!
Alone in the small hours, she washes me off.
Without my crimson luster—just Norma Jean.
—first published in the Little Patuxent Review
The diction is perfect. Read the poem out loud and the perfection of the sound rubs your ear. The images are very visual, and tactile too. In the second stanza see how the metaphor of the arsenal is developed. What is also a joy in this poem is that it is understandable. We don’t have to go to Peru or a footnote in Wikipedia to understand and enjoy the scenario. However, as accessible as it is, as graphic, this writing is beyond the average poet. Ms. Brewer goes the extra mile. It takes talent plus.
Another wonderful poem—-among so many—is “The Cone Sisters”,
The Cone Sisters
The Yellow Dress, oil on canvas, Henri Matisse, 1929-31
The Cone Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art
Oh, Etta and Claribel, you gave me The Yellow Dress,
part of my own wardrobe now.
In the presence of shimmer,
must I wear a burdensome winter coat ?
I picture myself slipping
Into glorious yellow taffeta.
Rich spinsters, two sisters,
Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone
met Monsieur Matisse in Montmartre.
Art patrons, they lapped up his work.
My Baltimore Ladies, he called them,
his voice steeped in affection.
Austere in long dresses and high Victorian collars
early twentieth-century apparel—the sisters
gathered the greatest collection of Matisse
in the world. On a map a mere sliver from my home.
A guard spins me around this museum room,
across shiny, patterned floors.
Everywhere I look,
a galaxy of light.
—first published in the Loch Raven Review Volume 17
There is so much more in Wild Girls. Shirley Brewer explores the mundane, which is not mundane in her writing. She empathizes with those who have experienced tragedy either through the hands of the world or through their own hands. This book is a magnificent read, beauty, joy or pathos.
© Shirley J. Brewer and Dan Cuddy
Shirley J. Brewer is a Pushcart-nominated poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for Arts & Technology in Baltimore, MD. Her poems appear in Passager, Plainsongs, Poetry East, Gargoyle, Slant, The Comstock Review, and many other magazines. Shirley’s poetry books include A Little Breast Music, After Words, Bistro in Another Realm. She received the first-ever Creativity Award from the University of Baltimore, where she earned her Master’s Degree in Creative Writing/Publishing Arts.
Dan Cuddy is currently an editor of the Loch Raven Review. In the past he was a contributing editor of the Maryland Poetry Review and an editor for Lite: Baltimore’s Literary Newspaper. He has had a book of poetry published “Handprint on the Window” in 2003. Most recently he has had poems published i, the Pangolin Review, Madness Muse Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, the Rats’s Ass Review, Roanoke Review, the Amethyst Review, Synchronized Chaos, Fixator Press, Beatnik Cowboy, Gargoyle. and The Chamber Magazine.
The Loch Raven Review 