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Farewell, My Lovelies

Diann Blakely

Paperback | Pages: 73 pages

Rating: 4.47 | 15 Users | 4 Reviews

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Original Title:	Farewell, My Lovelies
ISBN:	1885266839 (ISBN13: 9781885266835)
Edition Language:	English

Narrative As Books Farewell, My Lovelies

If there is a fault in Diann Blakely’s new collection, Farewell, my Lovelies, it lies in its overly Chandleresque title. Blakely’s vision is indeed Noir, but it isn’t of the hard-boiled, femme-fatale- with-eye’s-obscured-by-big-hat-kind, but more along the lines of southern Noir -- with a very identifiable strain of Bible Belt predestination providing the chief cog for a fate-driven universe. The speaker’s voice in these poems is often that of a brittle survivor.

Blakely’s desire for love remains intact, though weathered, even savaged, by experience. It is this overriding desire of Blakely’s that pushes her collection as a whole beyond the confines of the Noir genre. Nevertheless, Blakely knows noir’s universe well -- knows how we so often rise impotently and painfully in our lonely hopes, only to be left crushed and sputtering on the ground in a black on black world. In the poem “Duplex Noir,” Blakely brings the classical noir elements of despair and entrapment into play:

At dusk, stars fizzle in this landlocked sky 
and tv screens turn blue, like smoke rising
from my neighbors’ grill, smoke perfumed with meat
and already-spilled booze (they’ve brought enough):

And it’s the neighbors’ activity that compounds Blakely’s isolation, driving home the point that her lover hasn’t called. Bitterness and the desire for revenge is played out for the speaker in a movie, the word “meat” repeated throughout the poem as both judgment and pronouncement:

 You haven’t
called; my set darkens with Florida night sky, 
Hurt and Turner sweating over tonics slopped with rum,
the tang of cut limes rising as they plot to kill her husband. Enough –
I’ve seen Body Heat twice before, Matty

and Ned scheming to make Richard Crenna meat, 
dead burned meat, between drinks and fucks and calls
dialed from pay phones.

But with this bitterness comes a half acceptance of the world as it is; recognition of unalterable patterns that were perhaps discernable even in childhood, perhaps recognizable in the clinking glasses of her own parents cocktail hour:

 I’ve never had enough 
of Florida, seared breeze and mackerel skies
at sundown, my sand-crusted knees rising
from castles left to watery tectonics

as my parents, gins lightly splashed with tonic, 
picked at olives, cheese, cold sliced meats 
and sang my name, their slurred voices rising
like the waves.

Such remembrance is too painful as is the comfort of the color drenched noir of today (Body Heat and the poet’s own color drenched landscape), so escape is sought in the monochromatic world of Bogart and Bacall on “Channel 8.” There is a comfort in this familiar world of “Vichy thugs” and tough talking movie lovers; for even Noir had an earlier day of innocence. But the party intensifies next door, breaking the film’s spell, and the speaker hears shouts and voices through the walls. It is a hell made intense by the details around her. Relief for her loneliness is not to be found tonight on the TV; instead it can only exist as an ache, a desire for love that will somehow signal that flesh is not simply “meat.” But in the end such desire must return to earth, and by poem’s end the speaker coldly assesses her surroundings, her trapped existence:

 One call- 
that’s all it would take, and what’s more tonic
than flesh on flesh? I could arrange to meet
you anytime. Stars vibrate in the sky,

now black above rising wires, trays of tonic
and leftover booze: they’ve burned enough meat
to call for pizza. Late news. No choice of skies.

In the poem, “Independence Day” the speaker is now at the neighbors' party; the whiff of smoke, even closer now; the sky is just as pressing in a suburban setting where adultery lies just beneath the surface, along with the fragility of identity:

Charcoal fumes and smolders while my friend piles our plates

 with barbecue, his sauce

a family recipe praised to the skies. This group’s kids

 soon clamor for ice cream,

which we skip to linger

 over beers in the hot twilight

circled by mosquitoes; when a hand moves one from my neck,

 I mistake the gesture for my husband’s, two chairs away,clasp that hand till someone

cracks a joke and I blush,

 look away so fast I’m dizzied,

Like Francesca in Dante’s Inferno, the speaker finds her existence disintegrating before great gusts of emotion; the desire for escape desperate - even pathetic:

 Heat and bugs and voices

whirl me from my own place in this humid circle,

 a whirl ridden to distant yards,

distant blocks - no, ridden further, till the landscape changes

 and names scatter and dim.

Wasn’t our country founded on such dreams of departure,

 dreams of new arrivals

 beneath brightly roman-candled skies?

Chandler is not the only spirit haunting Blakely’s poems. Flannery O’Conner is also here, bringing along with her Noir’s country cousin - Southern Gothic. In the poem “Yucatan, November,” the reader sees the genres mix into a toxic and grotesque blend, with the speaker lurching through the nightmare weekend burial of her grandmother south of the border. The speaker’s disorientation is in part fueled by a hard Tequila night, but it is also driven by the fear and apprehension of death. For the speaker, the world is now a grotesque place, leering back in the simplest, most innocent details:

five holiday shots, and the flowers on my room’s walls 
bloomed monstrously, their twisted stems coiling like snakes
before my eyes closed to sweaty, broken nightmares: 
my grandmother’s face metamorphosed six times a second
from flesh to skull then back again. The woman’s plump finger/
points to a table, its Especiale sign;

at first I take her wares for dolls that my nieces
would love, though the paint on this figure’s flower-cart,
that one’s full tray, another’s - a bishop’s? - black miter,

is probably toxic with lead. A longer look,
and the florista’s face becomes a skull, the bar-maid’s
the churchman’s; my god - he stands over a tiny coffin,

and when the woman presses a button, its skull, joined to toothpick-sized bones, sits up and stares. But love, and the desire for love, is what keeps Blakely going. For all the tough talk, she is a poet who has not abandoned hope -- she remains convinced there is an exit door in the labyrinth called Love; and with Love there can be found a center to Blakely’s universe, something other than Noir’s black despair.


In “Descant,” a daydreaming teacher, grading papers, reflects on Persephone and the nature of love itself:

 Who wants to study when her winter prom

 is just a week away?--

by then more letters will crowd my gradebook’s

pages in a well-ordered train. But what chaotic gods

 the heart has always worshiped;

 and would my students gape in disbelief if I told them how quickly I undress when

someone whispers love,

 shed my clothes on floors that seem to cleave

 beneath my feet?

In the collection’s final poem, “Chorale,” the speaker comforts a friend after her suicide attempt. The ghosts of Beethoven and Schiller are called up and the nature of life -- and choices we make in the face of it -- explored. The speaker’s friend, a diabetic, at first surrenders to death in an awkward suicide attempt and is only, by luck, saved.

 In August,

when her lover went home to his wife, my friend

 skipped one shot, two, skipped meals

to binge on twelve-hour naps, waking to nibble candy

 and hear, through the thin walls, an elderly neighbor

 playing sonatas. “Ode to Joy,”

Schiller’s most famous work, though we nearly lose the lyric

 in Beethoven’s grand chords,

 the 9th symphony composed after his ears closed

to all but music, as my friend’s eyes closed to all

 but the black-winged angel.

The speaker contrasts this surrender (with musical backdrop by Schiller) to her own experiences with love (with Beethoven accompaniment):

 The last time I fell in love

 I played Beethoven

so loud that pictures trembled and china rattled

 its shelves, Chorale’s strings and winds and horns confirming

 that joy - freude, freude --

is what we all desire, that while deep-kindled by the scent

 of hair, or the brief feathery touch of a hand,

 or the sight of a parted mouth,

desire arrows its way into the brain till flesh and mind

 become as one, singing

 our unrequitable ache to drown in sweetness.

And it is Blakely’s desire to sing of this ache, and its coexistent sweetness, that pushes her poetry beyond the confines of genre and toward a higher art.

*Note: This review is cobbled together from an earlier effort that appeared in the Samsara Quarterl (which is now lost (blocked) forever in the intenet Wayback Machine. I think I've corrected some things, but it was a total bear to format for Goodreads. But I've always tried to capture the appearance of poems in a review when quoting from them. I think I captured most of Blakely's spacing here. It was a lot of work (especially for someone like me who can't do formatting), but the collection was worth the effort.

List Based On Books Farewell, My Lovelies

Title	:	Farewell, My Lovelies
Author	:	Diann Blakely
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 73 pages
Published	:	January 1st 2000 by Story Line Press
Categories	:	Literature. Poetry

Rating Based On Books Farewell, My Lovelies

Ratings: 4.47 From 15 Users | 4 Reviews

Write Up Based On Books Farewell, My Lovelies

The author of three books--CITIES OF FLESH AND THE DEAD, Elixir Press, 2008; FAREWELL, MY LOVELIES, Story Line Press, 2000; HURRICANE WALK, BOA Editions, Ltd, 1992--Blakely is currently working on two manuscripts, RAIN IN OUR DOOR: DUETS WITH ROBERT JOHNSON and LOST ADDRESSES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS A poetry editor at ANTIOCH REVIEW for a dozen years, she continues that position at NEW WORLDIf there is a fault in Diann Blakelys new collection, Farewell, my Lovelies, it lies in its overly Chandleresque title. Blakelys vision is indeed Noir, but it isnt of the hard-boiled, femme-fatale- with-eyes-obscured-by-big-hat-kind, but more along the lines of southern Noir -- with a very identifiable strain of Bible Belt predestination providing the chief cog for a fate-driven universe. The speakers voice in these poems is often that of a brittle survivor. Blakelys desire for love remains

If there is a fault in Diann Blakelys new collection, Farewell, my Lovelies, it lies in its overly Chandleresque title. Blakelys vision is indeed Noir, but it isnt of the hard-boiled, femme-fatale- with-eyes-obscured-by-big-hat-kind, but more along the lines of southern Noir -- with a very identifiable strain of Bible Belt predestination providing the chief cog for a fate-driven universe. The speakers voice in these poems is often that of a brittle survivor. Blakelys desire for love remains



Blakely is very accomplished at wielding a variety of styles, even within a single poem, to convey her views of the world. Her scope is mostly out-of-the-way cultural practices in various parts of the US South, with excursions to New York City. She takes off in interesting ways from items in popular cultures and classical music.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:5.0 out of 5 stars Roll Over, Emily Dickinson, and Give Marianne Moore the News, August 15, 2001By Stanley Booth (Brunswick, GA United States) - See all my reviews The USA has been blessed with fine distaff poets -- Dickinson, Moore, Levertov, to name three -- but they are precious few, not more than one or two per century. Great poets of any gender are rarer than ivory-billed woodpeckers. What a joy it is to recognize the magnificent talent of

Here is the review I wrote for Farewell, My Lovelies for First Draft in the fall of 2000. Thirteen years later, I would change nothing except to call "Bodies" the canzone that it is, now that I know that form!Dan AlbergottiReview of Farewell, My Lovelies by Diann Blakely--from the fall 2000 issue of First Draft (Alabama Writers' Forum)There must be very few poets who would consider writing a poem that compares the relationship of T.S. Eliot and his first wife, Vivien, with that of punk rock