Grace Nichols, "Picasso I Want My Face Back"

After many prize-winning collections, the British-Guyanese Grace Nichols still manages to surprise. This time, the mesmerizing lure of painting is what runs through her lilting lines. The eponymous opening section must be enjoyed by constantly leafing back to the book’s colourful cover, Picasso’s “Weeping Woman”. Dora Maar’s, Picasso’s model, muse and mistress, is here given a voice. Abandoned by the painter and frozen as an emblem of pain, she pictorially laments her fate: “Green knows me --/ Not the green of new shoots / but the ghastly green of gangrene”. Moreover, she has to put up with the comments by the visitors at the Tate Gallery (“Children, they’re the worst / touching the nerve of the best artwork”) and with her restorers’ work. Be it bitter or light, irony is one of the tones where Nichols always succeeds, as when Dora fights to recover her own spiritual wholeness (“I am no moth flitting around his wick. / He might be a genius but he’s also a prick”). In her path towards this goal, she eventually achieves a detached, liberating self-affirmation, which allows her to see her own painting in a different light (“Green is my growing point / the tips of my sprouts”). She thus touches the core of Picasso’s genius and of what “Weeping Woman” stands for: “All the sad and broken things of the world, / the small hopes that will never be noticed / or nurtured by anyone.” Gender issues also sizzle in the final section, “Laughing Woman”, probably related to Nichols’s celebrated past collections on Long-memoried, Fat Black and Lazy female voices. Here laughter is given a defiant, unrestrainable energy: the ideal man is “the one who simply surrenders / to her mind’s candle / even as he stumbles / upon the g-spot of her laughter”. Between the opening and the closing sections, the middle parts of this book are made up of miscellaneous poems where mutual cross-suggestions between writing and figurative arts often re-surface. They include lines on Aubrey Williams, Van Gogh, Picasso again, R.S. Thomas, Munch, Baghdad Museum, Tracy Emin and, more generally, on features of many world landscapes. And when it comes to the autobiographical poem “Daughters”, one can feel the same resolute stance expressed by Dora Maar: “Daughters insist in painting their faces / like the canvases of defiant artists / finding their own tones and colours -- / Not a complement to anyone / but a species in themselves.”