​Review of Blue Lovers by Elizabeth Paul, by Susan Ayres

​Review of Blue Lovers by Elizabeth Paul (Yavanika Pr. 2024)
 
Elizabeth Paul’s ekphrastic chapbook, Blue Lovers, is a homage to Marc Chagall and an incredible series of love poems describing the speaker’s love for her partner, and Chagall’s love for his first wife, Bella. The chapbook interweaves the two sets of lovers in fourteen prose poems. For example, in “Birthday,” the speaker compares quirky details, such as the orange floor in Chagall and Bella’s house to “our first one” (10). Similarly, in “Lovers Over Paris” the speaker announces:

Our love makes postcards of every place, bouquets of trees, music of sky  Every other person is a witness of how you can’t hold me close enough, of how my feet can’t find the floor (3)

This description could be one of many of Chagall’s paintings of lovers waltzing through the sky.  Like other prose poems in Blue Lovers, “Lovers Over Paris” is titled after a painting by Chagall. Paul’s poems are not simple descriptions of Chagall’s paintings, but impressionistic pieces in the spirit of the paintings. The poems have minimal punctuation (commas, question marks, but no periods), which enhances the tone of dreaminess, similar to the dreamy, floating tone of Chagall’s paintings.

Although the poems in Blue Lovers are titled after works by Chagall, they do not follow the chronological order of his paintings. Instead, the sequence is a loose expressive order based on the chronology of the lovers’ relationship. The first poem, “Time Is a River Without Banks” describes the lovers’ “beginnings” as a time of “charmed hour of quietude and all questioning hushed” (1). This first poem sets the comparison between the speaker and Chagall through the repetition of the phrase “I would be that Chagall couple.” 

By the sixth poem, the lovers have moved into “middle age,” an era described as a surprise which “feels swampy, landlocked with a view in every direction but no opening” (“Paris through the Window” 6). The middle poems also move into dreams, including the speaker’s dream that her lover has lost an arm, and a dream that “[y]ou were me and I you” (6). Another poem describes a dream of separation in which she has “almost forgotten [her lover]” (7). 

The speaker misses the world and longs to be alone or separate in “Les Amoureux de Vence” (4). This theme of merging and separation constitutes a major tension in the lovers’ relationship. In “The Poet Reclining,” the speaker addresses the painter: “Marc, I imagine we don’t have much in common, but I see we both chase the feeling of skying pink or greening nubile to a forever twilight and romantics that we are we both seek it in someone else” (5). The poem asks: “How do you thrive on the conundrum?” In other words, how does one accept the merging with another? By the end of the collection, the speaker is at peace with “sinking into the shape of us” in a stillness that reflects “perfect maturity, not one waiting bud, not a spent bloom” (“Lovers in the Lilacs” 13).

As suggested by the title of the chapbook, the emphasis is on blue. For Chagall, blue is not a colour symbolizing depression (as in Picasso’s blue period), instead, blue symbolizes the imagination and the sacred. In both Chagall’s paintings and Paul’s poems, there are “blue lovers,” who float “in an all-consuming Blue—something much bigger than adoration, something humbling, making holy clowns of us” (“Blue Lovers” 7). Likewise, in “Cirque Paris,” the speaker has “relaxed in my daring acrobatics” and come “[f]ace to face with you in this beautiful fall that is ever a fall and never a fall” and has learned “to think in light and shadow, breathe in the Big Blue” (12). 
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The relationship between the lovers is sacred and fleeting, as Paul indicates in “Paris through the Window”: “We often stand and look out the window  I thought it was for the view, but it’s for this image of us, the waking dream to create to see what we need to know” (6). The speaker and her lover use everything in the mundane world to express their love, just as Chagall does in his paintings. These everyday objects may or may not rise to the level of the symbolic. In “Birthday,” Paul declares with a painterly eye that 

when we try to show our love, we have to use everything  The street we walked down, the park, the cherry and apple blossoms, the chill pinking our cheeks. The embroidered coverlet, the fringed window shade, block stool, the small white plates with the painted flowers, the condensation on the glass of cold milk (10)

As in Chagall’s paintings, the lovers exist to be witnessed; like the paintings, the poems exist to witness love. The final poem, “Couple in Blue,” shows acceptance of conundrum and change in the line “I’m part man, part spirit  You’re part beast, part bird” (14). The poem shows reconciliation to the mysteries and mystical qualities of love and growth, to the lack of boundaries and certainty: “I’ll take any messy, monstrous, hybrid answer to such a never-ending question” (14). Paul’s exquisite prose poems revel in the spirit of love, and like the paintings of Chagall, are quirky and playful, passionate and vulnerable, reminding us to honour and celebrate those closest to our hearts, and to “breathe in the Big Blue” (“Cirque Paris” 12).
 
Susan Ayres

Susan Ayres is a poet, lawyer, and translator from the Spanish. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in a variety of literary and scholarly journals. She has studied Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico, practiced karate for nine years with her son, and now spends time in Texas writing, collaging, teaching, and practicing tai chi. Her chapbooks are Walk Like the Bird Flies (Finishing Line) and Red Cardinal, White Snow (Main Street Rag). Visit www.psusanayres.com.

​Elizabeth Paul's work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Briar Cliff Review, Duende, and Sweet Lit, among other places. Her chapbooks Reading Girl (Finishing Line Press) and Blue Lovers (Yavanika Press) are ekphrastic explorations of the work of Henry Matisse and Marc Chagall, respectively. She teaches at George Mason University in the English Department where she serves as the International Students and Programs Coordinator and on the Composition Program’s Linguistic Justice Leadership Team. You can learn more about Liz and her work at elizabethsgpaul.com.