Beauty Refracted by Carol Moldaw

Four Way Books $15.95

Reviewed by Irina Moga

Carol Moldaw is an award-winning author of one novel and six books of poetry, including The Lightning Field, winner of Oberlin’s FIELD prize; she has also taught in many writing programs and conferences.

Beauty Refracted, Moldaw’s latest volume of poetry, surfaces tonalities that rely on a lush and far-reaching vocabulary and layers of memories that fluctuate in a space of light, ash, and refracted sensations.

While the timbre of Beauty Refracted resonates in almost hushed, subdued voices, it is exciting to observe the poetic narratives that come across with clarity and poignancy.

The geographical backdrop of some of Moldaw’s poems is a revolving door between the lyrical discourse and a fragmented reality:

Submerged like a floodplain, the past’s reshaped by brush

and bracken being swept downstream, by the water that,

subsided, reveals corrected contours, blank spaces, scraps.

missing, regretted, newly understood. (46)

A few poems in the collection bring forth the suggestion of a “loop.” It’s an intriguing concept, which branches out from poem to poem, from “Dream Loop #1” to “Loop: Pojoaque” to “Loop: The Barrancas” and others. Each poem contains its gathering of themes and symbols and leaves them out for exploration until the edge of the next “loop”; there is no circularity within these steppingstones—unless it’s the express openness of plot lines and endings that the poet takes us through.

The last section of the book includes the eponymous poem “Beauty Refracted.” This poem is a canto of motherhood and fantastic worlds, in which pain and imagination smooth out the inevitable pitfalls of growing and self-discovery: “The face she yearns for – a lost piece // of the puzzle that is herself has fallen through / the flooring, down the crack of a synaptic cleft” (69).

Such moments of introspection, on occasion, collide with beams of light and reveal the oblique and expanding poetic discourse that makes Carol Moldaw’s Beauty Refracted a fascinating book of poems.

Romanian-born Irina Moga is the author of four poetry books and a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada. Her work has appeared in Canadian Literature, dandelion, carte-blanche, PRISM International online, The Chaffin Journal and others. Irina’s latest poetry volume, Sea Glass Circe, was selected for an official book launch as part of the 2020 Toronto LitUp!, Toronto International Festival of Authors.