Review: Girls with Red Hair on Cherry Cadillacs with Bushido Swords

Girls With Red Hair on Cherry Cadillacs with

Bushido Swords,

 By Victoria Selene Skye-Deme

A Review By Chris Brockman

            Selene Skye is an incredibly skilled poet.  Her latest book Girls with Red Hair on Cherry Cadillacs with Bushido Swords is her skill, her favorite themes, her philosophy of life, and herself laid out in a collection as big and as luxurious as the red 1959 Coupe de Ville on its cover.  I’m not sure from whence comes the Cadillac symbol (albeit from the poem of the same name), but in Selene’s hands, one feels its power, smooth ride, and security through the tuck-and-roll leather, while riding through a strange new neighborhood--even though it’s without a safety belt.

            Readers familiar with Selene’s other books will recognize her personal wonderland.  Down her rabbit hole is the world of her own lexicon, sprinkled with jewels, flowers, and birds that aren’t; in which people are bones, spines, or ribs; women are thighs and hips, tongues and bellies; men, and other problems, are monsters; and wolves’ glowing eyes watch from the wild.  It’s “a world gone uncertain,” but through it all is “the edge of hope.

            The predominant theme through the first half of the book is the weakness, the deviousness, the violence of men.  Counterbalancing this is the strength and the wariness of women, and the prescription to be your own woman.  “I can tell you as the day is long that you must love the you before/you can love the them and the us.”  And for men:  “and so you made me into a woman who has had enough of/everyman/and every idiotic expectation that they harbor and want/but don’t really want/but do/I am not your whore/I am not your Madonna/I am not your child.” 

Sprinkled through this and in much of the second half, is a new, if tentative, trust of relationship; a rapprochement with love; and an overt appreciation of beauty.  “You were all over my dreams last night/and when I woke this morning/I woke up with you still like a memory in my skin/and the world felt different/and the colors were much brighter.”  Much of this can be seen to come from mother love of daughter, and Selene writes lovingly and protectively about her own and other young women:  “And yes, for you I wake/and yes, for you I fight/for you’re my inspiration/the blaze that lights my life.” 

This last signals something else new, here.  Selene intersperses her usual totally free verse with masterful use of rhyme, regular meter, and conventional semantics in other poems. The result for the reader is a new appreciation for the poet’s mastery of her art.

Selene offers nothing less than herself in these poems.  In “Woman” she writes:  “I wish I could give you my power/and I wish I could give you my voice.”  I believe she has done just that.

One caveat:  Though Selene makes absolutely no pretense of being anything but “a diamondback that curls into the blade of every hate,” some may find her short Part II to be a bit crude and egotistical.  When she asks, “And You Want To Be My Friend WHY?” it may be hard to come up with an answer.