Clouds Without Heaven

Beryl Baigent is a poet; her published collections include Absorbing the
Dark, Hiraeth: In Search of Celtic Origins, Triptych: Virgins, Victims,
Votives, and Mystic Animals.

The cover art, Paul Cézanne’s portrait of his wife In a Red Armchair,
leads one into the mood, theme, and subject of this volume, which is
divided into sections consistent with the artist’s motivation:
“Madame Cézanne,” “Portraits,” “Landscapes,” and “The
Lovers.”

Characteristically, Cézanne’s portraits have no eye contact with the
onlooker. Cézanne was not interested in setting up a dialogue, only in
imbuing his style of art with solidity and endurance. Perhaps Cameron
wants to redress this omission and develop a sense of the given moment
when she writes of how the artist “strip[ed] the beauty” from his
wife. M. Cézanne is depicted pouting, tearful, cheeks drawn, hands
“crabbed” and lonely. Occasionally, the poet speaks in the voice of
the model: “Little child in me, small bold one, / have I made you
tender? / Your father is out there, / in the garden, in despair.”

In Part 2, Cameron is the omniscient narrator who fleshes out the
subjects Cézanne chose for his portraits. “The Cook” “reads while
eating”; “The Peasant Holding a Wine Jug” experiences “delicious
gloom”; “The Woman in the Garden” contemplates the “many ways to
enter heaven.”

In “Landscapes,” Cameron evokes the “sirens,” “casualties,”
and “images of death” from which Cézanne escaped during the
Franco-Prussian war when he moved to live in L’Estaque. The landscape
symbolizes protection, a place where the protagonist tries to recapture
the innocence of childhood by making “snow angels.” In the poem
“We fall in a field,” Cameron notes the archetypal universality of
war and flight.

The final section poses the question “Who were/are The Lovers?”
Cézanne and Hortense may not be quintessential lovers (they met in
1869, had a son in 1872, and married in 1886—a fact that was concealed
from Cézanne’s father), so I can read no resolution here. But the
love poems couple water and a container, each relating to the other in
ways that evoke the 19th-century lovers but that through anachronisms
(“Alfred Hitchcock / in a shop window”), also allude to modern
paramours.

Cézanne was not interested in painting his autobiography, and Cameron
is not interested in writing explicit poems about hers. Each desires to
make his or her chosen art the ultimate concern. If you are interested
in poems inspired by art or in ways to experience the archetypal in all
artistic endeavors, this book offers some insight.