Crutchfield’s work is, in some ways, an inversion of this kind of pre/figuration. The poems of The Cyprian share KONTRA’s employment of ekphrasis as a suspension of figurative logic, but approach it with narrower terms, derived from a more objectifying focus on given artworks. Art objects – painted plates, dragonflies and octopi in ‘Alyki’; robes and mats in ‘A Clean House’; possessions that “settle into obsolescence” in ‘Nothing is Past’ (36) – are nodes in a poetics that attempts not only to meet those artworks but erase the distinction between the poems’ language and what it figures. While Andrada works figuration out from under itself, Crutchfield attempts to close the distance that must exist for ekphrasis to function.

In places, the poems of The Cyprian feel like studies of themselves, or studies of what we’d imagine ekphrastic poems about Picasso, Poussin, Bonnard to be: part of a net of references – including citations from Dante, the Homeric tradition, French, Latin, Arabic and Japanese terms – that are almost objets d’art themselves, or find themselves transformed into such by the poems. An instinct for simulation animates the work, hinting at how drawn lines would function in a textual medium: lines in stanzas feel self-sufficient, enjambment secondary to the drive for each line to convey a specific image/semantic chunk. In ‘Beautiful corpse’, the lines

The children stand by your bed
like fingers: middle, index, ring, little.
Two of them hold hands because
I have brought them to hear the corpse speak.

(44)

stand out because of how discrete, almost geometric, they seem. Each line corresponds to an image, one following on from the other until the last line of the stanza in which the introduction of the talking corpse shoots through the realism of the scene, the sense of logical progression, each line maintaining the same economy of description and matter-of-fact tone. It’s a drive toward a minimal, exact expression, according to an idea of painterly/classical decorum: ekphrasis not only as the desire to reproduce a given artwork in text, but also the sensibility behind a certain tradition. In ‘Young women in the Garden II/The Colour of Escape’, Crutchfield the poet seems to dissolve herself into Bonnard the painter:

Today he is reworking the image, 
He is adding gold 
To a painting of two women in a garden.

(51)

Or

Is this how lovers retouch?
A dot of ochre,
A stroke of yellow

(51)

In these stanzas, Crutchfield takes her style and directly associates it with a painter’s brushstrokes. Repetition, polysyndeton, individual daubs; the words dot and stroke blending noun and verb, the reciprocal touch of brush and canvas, of lovers’ hands. The touch rebounds to the reader. Ekphrasis – as imagined through this sensibility – almost comes to work backward, as radiating from the art-object, to the speaker’s eye, to the voice they use to create the poems; we could call the motivating gaze of the poems ekphrastic, even: a drive to observe and realise the object of a poem as if it were already a painting. A translation of a translation. It’s this ekphrastic gaze which grants Crutchfield the critical distance her poetry demands. In ‘Yew’, a stanza like:

The colour of a woman’s lips in rouge absolu. 
They say we paint our mouths this way 
to make them look more like 
the box of a defibrillator. Stop me
and start me up again. 

(24)

can serve as her poetry’s circuit of sense-making in miniature. A poetic gaze with an eye to ekphrastic effects/objectification (‘rouge absolu’ evoking both couture/fashion and Absolute Red, pure symbol, artist model and painter combined in one) turns back on itself to comment on the objectification that the speaker is subject to; the disjunction created by “the box of a defibrillator” a correlate to the alienation implicit in ekphrastic poetry between the subject of the poem and the object of its attention. The point at which it starts again/returns to itself is when another image begins, or the poem itself ends.

It’s this self-reflexive discontinuity that prevents parts of Crutchfield’s poetry from falling into preciousness or the tedium of a collector explaining where they sourced their Japanese tea set or Persian rug. The poems are at their best when this reflexivity is intensified to reveal the paradoxes of Crutchfield’s method: a style and gaze that frames the subject of the poem in the same way it figures the object ekphrastically, to the point the two collapse into each other, a collapse the speaker emphasises to stress their fundamental difference/irreconcilability. The two terms can never be truly one, even in the fantasising that becomes, in Crutchfield’s hands, a poem. If Crutchfield is motivated by this fantasy of oneness lying behind ekphrasis – and by extension, allegory – the difference is what she leverages to get at it. A deliberately hyperbolic ekphrasis –almost a paradigmatic form of allegory – is offered. In ‘Skoliosi’, the stanza

The Yasawans make
segmented fish from wood,
each piece, sliced to perfection, 
so it moves
like the real thing,
           swerving off in a flicked slew

(56) 

is almost semantic onomatopoeia: each line segmented in the same way it describes, the last line literally swerving off the page indent. The poem’s need to find a correlate between a poetic and plastic language –suggesting the arbitrariness of any correlate – opens a strange space within it.

By tailoring her style toward this exaggerated discontinuity, Crutchfield perversely emphasises a kind of Thus-ness in her work, one that dependently arises and disappears according to the rhythms of the poem and their greater or lesser level of ekphrastic evocation. The assertion/attempt, taken as far as possible, can only end up emphasising what absolutely resists translation from one medium to another and thus, the failure of capital A-art as a mediating element. In the conceit of an ekphrasis without remainders, Crutchfield measures the fact of disparity, the floating shards of experience that, by virtue of the attempt, end up situated beyond the capacity to mediate, via art, religion or language. It’s a fine line, one that banks on a reader’s familiarity and investment in her classical frames of reference. Inevitably, it can’t be rewarding to every reader over every poem. Even so, it is as much a way of decoupling the kernel of experience from allegory as any, one that emerges, like Andrada’s method/strategy/approach, from a similar concern with the stakes of figurative language and what can be done about it.

It would not seem so, but in their respective ways each approach implies and elaborates upon the other. It would not be too allegorical, hopefully, to call them the destitutive and constitutive approaches to allegory: the former, through a staging of what conditions allegory, creates a poetics of unconsent toward it and discovers ways to model allegory’s deactivation; the other, through a deliberate exaggeration of ekphrastic style, ends by evoking what can only resist the effort of figuration, a gap it can only end up emphasising. It’s the achievement of both works, the experience of conversation between the two, that this gap, in its refusal to signify, allows us to sense – in language – something that can’t be rendered in language: a transformative potential snaking its way into real-space beneath the gaze of the perfect world and its murderous, allegorical paradise.