Cinema Muto

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s third collection of poems, Cinema Muto, attempts to capture the artistry of silent film, a nonverbal enterprise of gesture and pantomime, in the pure language of poetry. This is a challenging task, but Kercheval has proven herself a poet who rises to occasion; her last book of poems, the well-received Dog Angel (2009), managed to synthesize faith, pop culture, tradition, her mother’s death, and myriad other topics into a single manuscript. In Cinema Muto, she takes the opposite tack, narrowing her focus solely to silent film, particularly the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and the work of Ivan Mosjoukine. Still, readers who enjoyed her first two books will be glad to know that the incisive voice and unornamented imagery inhabiting those collections has also found a home in this one.

Like a screenplay, Cinema Muto is broken into three acts, beginning with Saving Silence, a one-page manifesto in which Kercheval asserts the reasons behind her choice of subject. "There are as many feet / of nitrate film dissolving / as there are bones / in the catacombs of Paris," she writes. Then, a few lines later, "So why do I care? Because / my mother was deaf, / because I am tired after years / of talk-talk-talking." These short lines allow her to take advantage of enjambment for dramatic effect, a technique which shows up throughout the book. In My Husband--Lover of Silent Film--Attends La Giornate del Cinema Muto, for example, she writes "the lights go out / & the screen is filled w/ / deliberate silence, / w/ the black & white / gestures of a lost / world." Line breaks like these keep the reader slightly off-balance, as the cuts in a good film would. Combined with Kercheval’s other dominant formal choices (a mobi...

... middle of paper ...

...s much to say, and while there are occasional moments where passion gets the better of her ("Mosjoukin yells above the panicked rhythm of the horses-- / Never be afraid! / I think He's talking to me / I think He knows how terrified I've always been"), the poems never encroach on sentimentality. Part biography and part love letter, the sequence leaves its reader entranced with Mosjoukine (his "arms outstretched," his "body nearly unrestrainable,") and curious enough to start ordering DVDs.

Sharing her passion was, more than likely, one of the goals Kercheval had in writing the book. Her affection for silent film is omnipresent in Cinema Muto's eighty-odd pages, and this is what makes it such a compelling read--while there are plenty of well-crafted poetry collections released each year, it's hard to find one that feels this authentic in its detail and sentiment.