Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror

Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror  

By Jessica Jones 

Negative Capability Press, 2024 

Paperback: $16 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Eleanor Boudreau 

The title of Jessica Jones’ new book, Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror, prefigures poems of both self-revelation and self-reflection. “Do you wanna see / my secret hiding spot?” the speaker asks in an early childhood poem. And, yes, of course we do! As the collection progresses, the speaker gets older, but she never loses her childlike sense of wonder or commitment to showing the reader her most cherished places and memories.  

Yet Jones’ title is not as unabashedly confessional as it might (at first) appear, because it comes from a sixteenth-century work of art— “Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror” is the title of a painting by Venetian master Giovanni Bellini completed in 1515. In Jones’ poem of the same title, a lover’s fascination with the speaker’s flesh is compared to the painter’s attention to his subject: 

He thinks my body is Renaissance  

perfect. No small supermodel bones  

to bear, but full of curved, intellectual 

question marks, round with fertility,  

full like our years  

 

together. He tells me Bellini brushed my 

skin with ivory—precious  

commodity wrapped in his arms.  

Here, the intimacy between the speaker and her lover is intertwined with a description of Bellini’s art. As well as a love poem, “Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror” is also a work of ekphrasis—or, in other words, a verbal representation of a visual (or non-verbal) work of art. Like Jones’ “Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror,” most canonical works of ekphrasis are written about a painting or a sculpture—think, for example, W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” or John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Yet Jones’ collection includes ekphrastic poems on a surprising range of visual art, including a video game and Disney TV show (“Let’s Play Pixie Hollow”), an 1850s invention by Hermann von Helmholtz (“Helmholtz Resonance”), and a haunting image by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Kevin Carter (“The Vulture”). Jones also expands the bounds of traditional ekphrasis to include poems about a variety of musical genres, such as late ‘90s R&B (“He Said”), jazz and blues (“The Voice of Jazz”), and opera (“La Bohème”). While ekphrasis is one of the lesser-known literary genres, it is the genre that most nakedly meditates on the nature of art, and it is as central to Jones’ collection as the figure of a young woman is to Bellini’s painting.    

As the critic W. J. T. Mitchell notes, the definition of ekphrasis can be expanded to include any poem that aims to draw a picture in the reader’s mind; and this is exactly what happens in Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror. Even in her poems that are not, technically, meditating on a work of art, Jones describes the landscape with a painter’s eye for color. For example, the vivid hues in “Ninety-Eight Sunrise”: 

Black bark and bare limbs prick the sunrise 

till it bleeds a most extraordinary  

orange.  The road south begins a coral 

hue, where pecan trees march in lines 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  

. . . Cornflower frosting tops the pink- 

peach layer of sky while straight lines  

meander around magnolias—bridging the gap 

between heaven and earth.  

Over the course of Jones’ book, the speaker loses her grandmother and her son, but her grief does not blanch what she sees. Instead, the bright pigments remain. In a sequential pair of poems near the end of the collection, domestic items turn iridescent with sunlight. First, in “Catching Colors,” “prisms / held up by chandelier strings”: 

. . . throw 

colors on the ground. Walls  

splatter with hues: 

reds, greens, blues.  

Next, in “Ablaze, Outside the Window,” a hummingbird feeder refracts sunlight: 

Shaped like a hot air balloon, colors stream through a patchwork of prisms. Pouring in from my window, I saw warmth, memories, sparks of color, reminding me of their love while I stand in the kitchen alone. 

In this late poem, the window serves as a literal frame for the rainbows and a metaphorical frame for the speaker’s memories. “As is painting, so is poetry,” writes Horace, and Jones seems to agree. Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror is iridescent and indelible.  

Eleanor Boudreau is a poet who has worked as a dry cleaner and as a radio reporter. Her first book, Earnest, Earnest? (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), won the 2019 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, a Florida Book Award, and was a Finalist for the Medal Provocateur from the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of West Alabama.