María Negroni’s “Dark Museum” Reviewed by Chris Moran

Dark Museum is a very little book, but it is a rich one. In these five brief essays, María Negroni illustrates a highly developed Gothic sensibility immersed in primeval wonder, “a purely sentimental domain where it is suddenly possible to perceive, under any light, the critical link between childhood and atrocity, art and crime, passion and fear, and the desire for fusion and writing.”

Negroni writes in a twilight language that extends deep into the subconscious, with a “hallucinatory knowledge” of Gothic architecture, dream spaces, vampires, castles, labyrinths, underground lairs, and the significance of water. She knows that poets are conduits for strange energies, and that their invaders are undetectable by ordinary perception. The post-Socratic Greeks thought of the psyche as “the ghost that thinks.” And poetry, as seen through Negroni’s particular lens of perception, is a kind of psychic technology related to the esoteric and the unknowable:

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Théophile Gautier, Mary Shelley, Swinburne, and Renée Vivien already knew at the end of the last century (in their own dying society similarly choked with progress) that asthmatic breathing––as any ostentation––is a matter of lack. And so, the decadent beauty of its production, awash with emblems, martyrs, intrigue, and lamentation, like the light illuminating the dark allegory on Baroque canvases, is the effect produced by opposites. Reduced to a state of ruin, language no longer serves for communication but, instead, creeps much closer to (the territory of) the unknowable. Finally, in the house of meaning, the roof has flown off.

Negroni is drawn to isolated and self-created utopias like Captain Nemo’s underwater library and the Bomarzo Park of Monsters. She relishes these hidden spaces, essential, as they are, to her Gothic and decadent sensibility. Her self-created utopian dream spaces have a ritual potency: they open realms that exist outside of the consensus of reality. And she’s a master of these in-between states of awareness, where reality’s rules are ready to be rewritten.

Consider her insight into Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto:

His intuition was simple: if reality exceeds what is observable, then darkness is a gift, as is awareness of the darkness in the world.

Negroni’s writing is always emotive and suggestive, full of melancholy and magnificent, strangely alien images from the subconscious. She links ideas that are at once bizarre and oddly familiar. And they, like Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, feel like “a shadow of something real” and “the way of knowing things.”

Dark Museum is also sensitive to the crisis of consciousness a poet is often subject to. Negroni sees poets as vampiric entities, and “nomadic types, aliens, vagrants––in other words, eternal widow-children clinging to a world of old catalogs, lost objects,” existing in limbo, who “gravitate without exception to the shadows of chaos, sexuality, and night.” For her, the true poet is the poéte maudit, damned, yet still able to partake in a private ecstasy:

Like Nosferatu or Carmilla, poets are creatures of the temporal abyss (which is also the abyss of lacking identity), rapt individuals who cling to the ruined castle of their projections, who are exasperated by having to witness eternally what never stops dying. Maybe that’s why they say so little and, when they do, they babble interjections, rhythms, disremembered things, as if that might bring them a little closer to the meaning of the body that banished them and fend off, for once, the motionless night. With every amorous attack, they return to sorrow as to an infallible safe-conduct and renew a pact that entails secret obligations: their paraphernalia of cruelty lends them the dark beauty particular to fleeting images. All contamination implies trembling, dizzying shadows. (It is imperative to make it through the night alive.) Their hunger is for words––as Hölderlin says––to open like flowers. On the threshold of naming, the poem chooses, in extremis, an edifying misfortune: it holds back, defeated and defiant, like a widower identifying with death.

The essays in Dark Museum have a distinguished and refreshing sensibility, constantly hovering around the ineffable and the sublime, and they display a sensitivity that cultivates a deep understanding of sadness. Negroni navigates the impossible by making it not appear so, and she even makes James Cameron’s Aliens, a movie I don’t care for, seem compelling and worthy of scrutiny.

The space in Dark Museum feels archetypal, mythic, and without clear precedent. Words are talismanic and a curse, and desire, death, dreams and decadence mingle with sorrow and the grotesque. Dark Museum is full of symbols of power, along with the grandiose melancholy of decadence — like a skeleton key used to unlock remote areas of the psyche, where a poet is forever in limbo, hovering in a liminal space somewhere between the real and the unreal.

Chris Moran is the author of GHOSTLORD (Solar Luxuriance), Night Giver (privately released), and Poison Vapors (Solar Luxuriance). His poetry has appeared in eccolinguistics, PLINTH, West Wind Review, and LIES/ISLE. He lives in Columbus, OH.