Review of Anything in Turquoise
Klein writes about people who are not very far from the ghetto; a grandmother, married at fifteen, who spends long hours scrubbing freezing marble floors and hates her husband; her parents' disastrous first meeting in 1939: These poems with a strong human interest and many others, are work of a very high order.
Merryn Williams writing in The London Grip, Autumn 2013
Klein's poems are often assertive and unforgiving yet read beautifully - not a word out of place, a singing rhythm - it paints with a depth of observation many poets should be envious of.
Anne Stewart writing in Artemis Poetry, Issue 11, November 2013
Anything in Turquoise offers a haunting, heightened Technicolor world, the cover of which is soon blown to reveal a desperate sadness beneath - due to her loss of a 'clever mother who barreled / through her short life on irony and insults' (Screensaver, 1941), and poverty encountered on her wide-ranging travels: 'their arms are filled with rainbows.' (In Praise of the Children who Sell Scarves at Angkor Wat.) Add to this her novelist's cinematic skill and the milking of objects for every drop of metaphorical worth and one understands why 'dazzling' is a commonly used epithet for her work - used in all senses of the word.
Klein's poetry is as if frozen in the moment where the child's fresh encounter with the world has been aborted due to this painful early death. As a result the poems either attempt some form of repair or reflect distrust of the world's beauty. Sometimes this dazzling surface cannot be undermined by subsequent loss, such as in 'Just Jacaranda': 'The colour makes you gasp, / and knowing you can't describe it; that words / are too usual' or in the incantatory lines of 'I Greet the Blue Water Buffalo of Cambodia': 'O your blueness is so much deeper than power blue, / though far short of midnight, closer to sapphire, / cornflower, steel.' Yet most often we get a more Stevie Smith-like sense of 'not waving but drowning' where the poems become self-contained metaphors of life's false gloss such as 'Dressing the Dearest Child' which draws on the Mongolian tradition of protecting a dying child with a glittering shroud:
colour of calm, the splashes of poppy, the peplum spangled
with Ghenghis gold, shoulders padded, ready to receive the wings
that will carry her to safety when her time on earth runs out.
Or at the more extreme end where the gloss veers towards tackiness - as in 'Pantomime' or 'Consider the Carousel' with its 'gilded lions, the jeweled horses,' with the child still nevertheless desperate for a ride.
In recounting her subsequent orphanhood Klein uses her skill as a novelist to resurrect her feisty mother for the reader, particularly in the opening 'A Short Manhattan Lullaby, 1939' with the desperate tension of her parents' first date: 'I see her pucker up / for the brightest lipstick, slip her feet into lethal stilettos' - note that lovely weighted use of 'lethal' and 'I want to say stop you'll destroy each other'. (This same novelist's skill later offers a more life-affirming war tale of a girl's daring bike ride on the trail of a near death march of imprisoned women: 'keep going, ten kilometres don't give up' 'On a Road near Koronovo'.) 'Menagerie' shows her early separation from her grandparents: 'I shuffle the black /and white photos of myself at three, at four, at five, /when they sent me back', or an aunt's dutiful coldness: 'When I return the book to aunt Ruby, handled with care, it is bone-clean, /unblemished; no blood, no sputum, no love. 'I Borrow Aunt Ruby's Jane Eyre.' In 'A Short History of My Aversion to Libraries' she conceals such hurt in dark humour referring to 'Daddy's Saturday' so that the reader feels glad to know she ends with a daughter of her own - in a delightfully defined relationship: 'The way we know a daughter: / every dimple, every smile, every tantrum; / the way we do not.' 'Portrait of my Daughter as a Portrait.'
Objects feature powerfully to contribute to these extreme emotions. 'Button Box' is delightfully accurate: 'and though they look identical, they're tricksy, titter / amongst themselves, with their secret knowledge / of how they're always and always not quite the right size', while the tightly constructed 'Marble' continues a feeling of her growing up in a word of clinical family relations as she cleverly unpicks the grandfather's controlling relationship with her grandmother:
no sign of grey marble,
ripped out after his last fall; her triumph of comfort
over the ten ammonia-free years without him.
With poetry collections less is generally more and Cinnamon would be wise to pare down their collections to the more commonly adhered to forty poems. I think this would have better showcased this strong collection. This aside, Klein is doing something that is very much her own with this vivid visualizing of the material world to express something unique about the human condition.
Belinda Cook's Review of Anything in Turquoise