A wild ride of angels, monsters, slapstick and pop. In this not so divine comedy actress Isabella Rosselini becomes Leggett’s post-modern Beatrice. A book that begins and ends with angels and recalls the spirit of Yeats’ Crazy Jane:

‘For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’

– Craig Powell

Andrew Leggett’s second collection of poetry, Dark Husk of Beauty, investigates death, innocence, links between the body and psychology, war, love, angels and the search for self and salvation. Leggett’s practice in psychology and psychiatry shines through as this book excavates the human mind, dredging up both treasure and trash. Symbols and simulacra weave a dark world where love equates to guilt, duty to psychological self-harm and where the subconscious spits on the canvas of reality.

Dark Husk of Beauty is broken into three parts. This effectively delivers each section in a palatable size, as the diverse topics covered by the poetry therein can become overwhelming. Being hung in an art gallery, torturing a Jewish ballet dancer, helplessly watching dead children bloat, ordering wine in a desert of unrequited love in Mughal, undergoing and autopsy while conscious, and investigating animal-hybrids (among other things) might have that effect. Isabella Rossellini gives a guided tour through the highs and lows of psychological destruction. Mix in a plethora of pop-culture references and a litre of David Lynch and you’re almost there.

“Angels”, a grief filled elegy provides a strong opening for the book. The tone immediately forms a clear connection with anyone who has experienced loss.

We worked on her
For half an hour
For the sake of the ambulance men
Who’d worked on her
For half an hour before us.

“Angels” bravely explores the responsibility that arrives with death and the common feelings of inadequacy often experienced when it is unable to be warded off. The many forms of salvation are explored explores throughout The Dark Husk of Beauty, also accounting for the many methods sought. Unfortunately, the elements that make this collection interesting also set up its shortcomings. The most original and heartfelt moments of discovery are overshadowed by references to pop-culture that struggle to find relevancy.

Leggett attempts to draw links between dreams and waking life by using popular examples from surrealist film and linking them to the subconscious. Leggett uses specific characters from the films of David Lynch, and occasionally projects possible further plot points within the framework of Lynch’s work. Unfortunately, this has been applied to his own narrative in a manner that leaves one to wonder how much is personal fantasy rather than metaphor. These Lynch-ian references protrude awkwardly, and the motivation behind their use past individual like or dislike is left unexplained. While the technique of referring to popular and established characters is effective on a base level, it leaves little room for new characters, new symbols or new meaning without the crutch of referring to another artist’s work.

A simulacra of Isabella Rossellini appears through many poems, but Leggett’s motivation behind projecting a goddess-like stature onto Rossellini is never established. By re-appropriating her as a poetic object there is no sense of reality, only idealism. Leggett also expects a level of assumed knowledge into the work of Lynch and Rossellini, which risks rendering the poems inaccessible to anyone who is not aware of the particularities. Particularly in poems like, “The Hollywood Recruitment Blues” and “Blue Rose Case” does the over-saturation of David Lynch references overshadow Leggett’s obvious ability to create original and meaningful text.

In “The Hollywood Recruitment Blues”, Leggett describes a dream-like scene where David Lynch is in his kitchen, shaking his hand and speaking to him as if he is Albert Rosenfeld—the sardonic coroner of Twin Peaks.

“This is Special Agent Ingrid Bergman!
Shouted Gordon. She will be
Your new partner. Doesn’t she look
just like her daughter Isabella?”

Leggett has drawn comparisons between Isabella Rossellini and Twin Peaks character Laura Palmer. Laura Palmer has a doppelganger both in the surreal and otherworldly Black Lodge, but also in her cousin Maddie. Incidentally, Isabella Rossellini is also known to look almost identical to her mother, Ingrid Bergman. Exploring the incongruence between the body and the different aspects of defining the self is clearly the important part of this poem. The reader is supposed to be mourning the paradox of being compared to one idealistic thing while embodying all the traits or warning signs of another. However, the battle between the ego and exterior effects of psychological damage is lost in the final statement:

… led me to the mirror.
I took a step backwards
Like a shocked county coroner.
The face staring back at me
Was that of Miguel Ferrer!

Leggett has then imposed the identity of Albert Rosenfeld, Miguel Ferrer (the actor who played Rosenfeld in Twin Peaks) and the first person persona that this poem was written in. This, unfortunately, gives the poem an exaggerated adoring tone comparable to fan-fiction. If this was one instance or one reference in a body of work, it would not have been an issue. However, the entire collection is rife with these references to the work of Lynch and that of other.

The next poem “Blue Rose Case” follows a narrative created by Leggett, but continuing to use Lynch’s character in a first-person persona. Albert Rosenfeld is also altered to Lynch’s original portrayal in an idealistic manner that gives him more sympathy, and creates a possible situation that might carry on from the end of the Twin Peaks series. The sentiments behind “Blue Rose Case” are commendable, however by choosing to continue to focus in so tightly on Lynch’s characters, it unfortunately cements the tone of personal fantasy.

The final poem in the first section, “Shower Scenes” disappointingly fails to deviate from the technique of relying on pop-culture to plot points of familiar emotional reference. However, David Lynch is vindicated in this instance and it is Alfred Hitchcock, Deborah Harry, Leonard Cohen and Stanley Kubrick who are charged. There are some beautiful moments in “Shower Screens”; unfortunately, the strongest lines are marred by the comparison of a Jewish dancer’s survival through the death camps to A Clockwork Orange:

Mengele retired to his rooms to shower away the dust.
Once clean, he sent for her.
Frau Schmerz brought him the ballerina
Tightlaced in a corset and black tulle.
When the servant was dismissed he put on a Strauss waltz
Then crushed pleasure from the dancer’s bones -
Like that of Kubrick’s Droogs driving reckless in a summer storm
To decimate the writer’s wife – playing ‘Singing in the Rain’.

A Clockwork Orange and World War II obviously both contained instances of ultra-violence and socio-political control. However, the conceptual nature of the film and the events referenced from World War II are so complex that when put next to each other, it is clear that they are not really comparable on the same level.

A Clockwork Orange created a likeable perpetrator and sympathy for him when he was being subjected to torture, cleverly depicting how such violent behaviours are created and sustained. “Shower Scenes” mourns the consequences of violence; the link between the despicable violence inflicted by World War II and the celebration of cinema violence evident in the work of Kubrick is successful at creating a popularized image of frenzied ultra-violence, but shaky beyond that. Since the point had already been clearly expressed in re-telling the moving plight of Dr. Edith Eger’s harrowing Auschwitz survival, however, the Kubrick reference seems superfluous and distracting.

However, “Shower Scenes” finds its way again in the third part, where Leggett dazzles with the final stanza. It beautifully cradles an aging wound that will never outlive the scars of such suffering.

She watches the light strike the black china ballerina
Posing in the recess on her vanity. She begins to dance
As she takes the soap and rubs it into the scars
Where the daemon rode on her beautiful back.

The highlights of the second section, entitled Prophecy were the three ghazals, for which in 2004 Leggett was awarded third place in the Val Vallis award. These poems are exquisite recounts of unrequited love that leave the reader with an aftertaste of grit and sour tears.

“Deposition” comes flaming in to assert itself as the stand-out poem of the final section, Wings of Desire. This is a descriptive prose-poem that claims to be a forced confession.

… the picture grew to flood my mind – a boyish brunette angel
with perky breasts constrained inside
the uniform of a private soldier, posing with her
prisoner naked on a leash, grinning as she leads him
through the excrement. I noticed a willowy figure
looming under the lintel of the doorway to the
secretary’s room. I soiled myself with fear. I realised
they were softening me up for interrogation…

Beautifully, Leggett weaves his way through terror, disgust and eventual psychological disintegration. The frightening autopsy undertaken while conscious is only marred by the brief mention of Isabella Rossellini, who is accused of being the devil and unnecessary Blue Velvet references, such as:

The soldier girl sat on a stool in the corner holding to
her face a mask connected to a cylinder of nitrous
oxide.

However, in examining the concept pf forced psychological self-dissection, Deposition is redeemed through the clever use of metaphor.

‘Heretic, recant!’ I broke. All the compartments of my mind ran together, all at once.

Dark Husk of Beauty appears to be just that. The literary outcome of many elements inside a complex human mind running together, all at once. This has resulted in a strong, well-written and very readable collection of poetry, however not for the faint of heart. And definitely not for those who don’t know where the Black Lodge of the soul is. In the short but sweet “Alchemy”, Leggett writes:

Poetry like wine
Ferments from the crushings
No good can come
Without something being broken.

This statement sums up the Dark Husk of Beauty. Leggett has proved with this collection that there is much to learn from the gaps between the pieces of what has been shattered. And in a society that is obsessed with smashing things, it is a necessity to be able to learn to appreciate the things that have been broken.

– Stefanie Petrik, M/C Reviews