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Review by Off the Shelf Correspondent Dennis Daly

Elegant beyond elegance. Moira Linehan stitches together a palimpsest biography of her mother’s mother, Marie Louise Raimbault Wacha, a nonpareil seamstress and dress designer. Based on very little hard information, Linehan conjures up backdrops, insights, and probable artistic techniques used by her grandmother. She does this by incorporating period art in an ekphrastic approach that uncovers the extraordinary will and likely contours of a magnificent lady. Wacha’s life spanned the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. The urban textile centers of Paris and Boston nurtured her.

In her well-wrought and telling sonnet, Ars Poetica, Linehan wonderfully describes the raw labor and hidden subtleties necessary in constructing a dress and, metaphorically, any serious artwork. Here she lists some of the basics,

‘& Company
By Moira Linehan
Dos Madres Press
www.dosmadres.com
Dos Madres PressLoveland, Ohio
ISBN: 978-1-953252-14-2
76 Pages

…The planning
beforehand. Washing washable textiles

to shrink them before they’re sewn. Laying out
the pattern so the design flows, the plaid lines
match, the dress drapes. Shears sharp so the seams
won’t pucker, twist, ravel. The seamstress’s stress

Then the fitting, the pinning and re-pinning
those seams. Right shade of thread? The sewing,
seemingly magic, not one stitch visible.
Each seam, steam-pressed flat till at last the sewn

carries material and a dressmaker’s vision
out into the world…

In the first of three stage-setting poems entitled Addressing the History, Linehan interweaves economic history and art history. For instance, she details the domino effect of new fashion trends and how they took her grandmother’s world by storm,

under it all, the corset. At first, just working
to narrow the waist, set off by jackets with wide
shoulders, with bodice seams, darts, braiding, rows
of buttons, maybe striped textiles, all verging in a V
at the waist. Not how tiny. Then corsets lengthened

to an hourglass. As that century’s second half starts,
ten thousand workers in Paris produce those corsets.
The year the American Civil War begins, over
one million are sold there. Dressmakers are talking
to salesmen, salesmen to weavers. Soon bolts of cloth
come with borders woven in for hemlines, for cuffs.
Soon the new fashion journals, then department stores

carry patterns, instructions for assembling skirts
and dresses…

Mary Cassatt captures the subtle art of dressmaking in her brilliant drypoint and aquatint painting The Fitting (circa 1891). Linehan mines this piece for its historic value in relation to her grandmother. The image portrayed contrasts a graceful and stylish standing woman with her attentive, sitting (almost kneeling) seamstress, who is wearing a simple brown garb. The standing woman is doubled by a full-length mirror. In her poem of the same name Linehan draws out, not only some of her grandmother’s essence, but also a temperament and social position. Here’s part of her description,

… She’s sitting on a low stool,
her back to the viewer, seams of her back
bodice on display. The center seam: pattern placed
so two strips of those four black lines get stitched
together at the neckband, leaving three lines
each side. But not just stitched. Fitted, so narrowing
to only three lines total at her waist. Likewise,
from left shoulder and right, strips of black lines,
taken in by darts. Each side of that center seam,
mirror of the other.

Another painting Linehan uses to great effect is Edmund Tarbell’s Girl, Crocheting (1904). The girl pictured seems content in her work, work that exists only in shadow. The artist even vanishes the girl’s face into shadow. A large portrait on the wall, however, leaves no doubt as to Pope Innocent’s identification and imposing figure. Linehan employs the grand pope as a figure of contrast with the contentedness of the crocheter, and both of them as a contrast to a new century and the impending revolution centering on the modern woman. The poet’s consideration of Tarbell’s portrait (copied from Velazquez) of Pope Innocent leads directly to a consideration of the breakout,

His waist-length cape, signature vermillion satin,
drapes in a V over a long surplice, its wide hem
of fine lace. Some claim it’s the greatest portrait
painter’s greatest portrait, this pope by Velazquez,
more or less a contemporary of Vermeer. Tarbell,

suggesting he has a foot in both those schools.
Tarbell, of the Boston school. Yet within the world
Of this art: all the unnamed. Nuns working bobbins
By window light, making lace for bishops’ vestments.
Women of Vermeer’s Delft about their daily lives.
This Girl in a long dark skirt, seemingly content
to crochet in shadow. She, a weir for Tarbell,
holding back the new century, those women marching.

Clues here and there suggest that Linehan’s grandmother, Maria, did quite well financially. Her poem, Getting My Grandmother to Boston notes that Maria’s tailor-husband was offered and accepted a managerial job with Boston’s largest manufacturing plant of woman’s fashions. Three years later he opened Jules Wacha & Company on Boylston Street. With these bare facts the poet’s (now well-schooled) imagination fills in the blanks,

So I decide to give her, as the “& Company,” part
of Jules Wacha & Company, the task
of overseeing its books as she oversaw
the finances of their home at 4 Zamora Street
in Jamaica Plain, my mother having told me
she grew up with servants—maids, housekeepers, cooks,
and gardeners—my grandmother keeping
from her husband (as my mother would) such
bothersome details…

This lovely book of artistic investigation concludes, not only with the reversal of her grandmother’s erasure, but also, revelations of the poet’s own craft and the intense, unforgotten influence of a mother’s love.