Reviewed by Jacqueline St. Joan
The Four Faces of Eve: A Tribute to Survival Paperback
by Connie Boyle, Brooke Granville, Petra Perkins, Gail Waldstein
Golden Antelope Press
February 2025, Paperback, 130 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1952232930
The faces of the four women on the cover of this book provide the kind of uncertain welcome you might feel when knocking at a stranger’s door. Will you find inside an enigmatic smile perhaps, or a piercing, soft eye? A silent, distracted glance, or an explosive rage? I tell you that if you open this door, you will find inside real women experiencing real life—its common yet particular pains and its impossible challenges, its saving graces and those losses that always win in the end. Do not let this warning deter you. Indeed, facing harsh realities with language to meet the task is one of poetry’s insistent promises. No faking, no backing off, no happy endings required.
The themes of this collection are: love, motherhood, grief and spirit. These ideas may bear different names in the poems themselves, although they could easily have been categorized as honesty, beauty, devastation, and openness. This is a coherent, well-structured collection of free verse. Here I will offer samples of what I mean, not judgment. We’ve all had enough of that.
Here there are moments of joyful precision that fall from Constance Boyle’s lines about the child she is birthing in her poem, “passage”:
cranial bones slide over one
another in silent overlap
eyelids wrinkle two walnuts
tightly closed
And in “bipolar II,” she provides a sneak peek into that special kind of cyclic mind and the breathing which living with it requires:
today on the phone speeding
through words a friend hears me
laugh long
blackboard scratches
I hang up calm down notice
how I blurted grandstanding
soloist drowning the tenor
Enter the Amour chapter, welcomed by the contradictory and true- to-life Petra Perkins who celebrates the joys life offers—even in the driveway.
You stand waving
your big heart at me
like a flag
above your silver head.
And we are so happy for the two of them…until the Resilience chapter where “In the Closet” complicates our reaction by describing the “addiction game” the two had played for years “before sobriety.”
He is bellowing now as he
stomps through every room
kitchen bedrooms basement office
garage he sees my car
he goes outside comes back in
“Where the hell are you, honey?”
he’s at the closet door
he flings it open
he only calls me ‘honey’ when drunk
I am shaking I hold tight
Brooke Granville, in the chapter on Death/Grief, uses imagery of the horn that announces death’s triumph, intoning the brass of devastation in “the oh of suicide”:
not the sympathetic oh
of accident or the elder’s death
not the oh dropped voice
constant note
but sliding down the tongue
circled lips trumpet of pity
his car running in the garage
your body broken by cement
her handgun in the tub
the oh no
Last, but certainly not least, in this poetic mural is Gail Waldstein, who laces her life of love and its loss with the bodies of dead children in the pathology lab where she worked, and with the split personality and guilt burden required of “working mothers.” Waldstein can turn a phrase, ignite a metaphor, create something new in all categories, whether it be acknowledging her daughter’s vision, or recalling the peak of love, or the struggles with mental illness, or the autopsy of a young woman.
Motherhood:
my daughter says
empty vases are sad
Amour:
…………………we swim
in water so green
our skin grows eyes
Resilience:
forty years ago labeled paranoid schizophrenic Thorazine silence
mind empty as the moon
Death/Grief:
I sliced
eight micra sections
peeled tumor off the blade with a
fine, sable brush lifted each piece
delicate as lingerie
I speak for Colorado when I say we see the weathering/ weathered faces on the cover of this book of poems because these poets have faced the sunshine, the rain and the freezing cold of life. We treasure this wall of women we may not know, yet we feel we do know them. They are our Eve, the source of all life, who eat the forbidden fruit, take God’s consequences and live to tell us about it.
About the reviewer: Jacqueline St. Joan is an award-winning poet, memoirist, essayist, writer of fiction and feminist legal scholarship. Her writing intersects the fields of law and literature with the voices of contemporary protest and reconciliation. She writes about history and family fictions; the abuse of women and inheritance of racism; the minds of children. She has a law degree and a Master’s in creative writing. A lifelong feminist, she is a mother, grandmother, and a social justice activist with a voice.