Anyone Can See I Love You

Betsy Nuse, the former owner of Boudicca Books, is a Vancouver poet,
writer, and editor.

Marilyn Bowering is not the first writer to be attracted recently by the mystique of the American film idol Marilyn Monroe. A sympathetic feminist biography, Marilyn, by Gloria Steinem, was published in 1986. However, Anyone Can See I Love You is an imaginative probing of Monroe’s psyche and various personae. Bowering has written short poems in Monroe’s own voice. They are arranged chronologically to describe key events in the film star’s life, from her first marriage at 16 through her death in 1962.

Bowering is a competent and skilled writer of free verse. Her poems are understated; few well-chosen words are arranged on each page. There are not many adjectives or lengthy descriptions, but objects and events — jelly glasses, Monroe’s “mad mother,” dream encounters with wild animals on a hunting trip — stand as points of reference in the sequence. They take on the character of grand iconic markers, entirely appropriate company for the public Monroe, the supreme icon of mid-century America: sex goddess, movie idol, quintessential blonde.

But at the same time the tone of many of the poems is quite conversational. Bowering achieves this effect by using words actually attributed to Monroe in biographies. Thus we hear a very human Marilyn speaking while watching her larger-than-life, public personae. A young woman’s longing for self-respect and decent relationships echoes within the grand but somehow empty chambers of dazzling and glamorous success. The result is a three-dimensional portrait that does more than either reinforce the stereotypes associated with Monroe’s public image or attempt to “reveal” a sordid secret inner self.

Notes in the book explain that these poems have been dramatized for radio and that a stage version is in production. Anyone Can See I Love You succeeds in reminding us that Marilyn Monroe, the modern mythic archetype, was under all and after all a woman.