Jessica Cuello's debut chapbook, Curie,
is a biographic poem cycle devoted to the Polish-French chemist,
physicist and twice-honored Nobel laureate who became one of the most
famous women of the 20th century.
Cuello's lyrically spare yet sensual
narrative style is well-suited to the subject matter of a serious yet
passionate woman who spurned frivolity and adornment and pursued her
work with absolute rigor but who also loved deeply and was fearless
in her intellectual curiosity.
Curie, as shown in these poems, was
driven by enthusiasm for her life's work in chemistry and physics as
well as by her devotion to her husband and lab partner, Pierre Curie.
Other pivotal events and catalysts in
her life included the devastating early loss of her mother and
sister, who died within a year of one another; her romantic
disappointment when the son of a couple for whom she worked as a
governess obeyed his parents' wishes to reject her because of her
poverty; her lifelong loyalty to her father and her native homeland,
Poland, for which she named one of the elements she discovered,
Polonium; and an affair she had with a married colleague after the
death of her husband which made her a figure of notoriety in the
French press for several years despite her international acclaim.
Cuello treats all of these topics with
an agile grace restrained by understatement.
In “Schoolgirl,” we read how the
young Maria Skłodowska
“stands for the Russian inspector” and recites the names of
the czars while her Polish-language books lie hidden in her desk:
“All my life there was a motion/ outside me, and under the desk,/
the saved page. I performed/ at will. My little arms grew.”
The poem ends, “Then it crystallized
–/ our shelves were full of specimens,/ burning outward in the
dark./ They could not be contained.
In the final part of “Casimir,” a
poem about her early suitor's rejection, Cuello's narration
dispassionately relays the young scientist's mindset as she embarks
on her studies:
In
Paris I arrived
without
a girl's desire.
I
used my memory
for
facts. With a porous
mind
I woke,
tin
roof slanted
over
me. Alone
I
made my myth
with
a cup
of
tea and radishes.
In a poem about the miscarriage that
ended Curie's second pregnancy, “Fifth Month,” Cuello writes:
The
child had been living.
I
knew her like the form
in
a sideways glance,
like
three words
in
a whisper before sleep
not
ordered for sense,
the
way we know everything
somewhere:
the salts we will find
at
the bottom of the ore,
my
husband awake
in
the kitchen, stiff with pain
when
my eyes open.
The next poem, “Pierre,” which
evokes Curie's despondency after the loss of her partner and husband,
begins by recalling the tenderness of earlier times:
Slow,
careful
as
words, you climbed
the
steps our wedding night.
Fingers
cradled the railing as I would cradle
your
head – no one else
feels.
Has ever felt.
I
wish I had no daughters,
no
work. No garish daffodils
in
a cup of water.
I
was an eye climbing the stairs.
My
eye saw out of my chest,
my
head heavy
with
emptiness.
“Rented Room,” a poem about the
affair with Paul Langevin, Marie's colleague, ends, “Yesterday, I
asked myself/ as though you were a compound/ why his body?/ My
first answer: to merge.// But my second: to annihilate/ the self.
I hate/ that you must plan your life.”
The cycle's final poem, “Last Day:
July 4, 1934,” describes the hospital bed where Curie was nursed by
her younger daughter, whom she had loved but never fully understood
because of their dissimilar personalities:
Her
fingers turn the sheets
and
the static coat
my
body walked in everywhere
loosens.
Our bodies hum
together
in a way
they
didn't in our lived lives.
The
metal bed glints
like
Gallium warmed in hands.
The poems in Curie
often begin by holding their treasure at a distance from the
unfocused eye, but as the reader is drawn closer, she catches first
a glint and then a growing sense of an underlying radiance. I
wish more poets wrote like Jessica Cuello does here.
