Title: Pearl

Author: Nancy Jo Cullen

Publisher: Frontenac House

Release Date: 2006

Category: Poetry

62 Pages

ISBN 1-89-7181-03-5

$15.95

4 Stars 

Reviewer: Kindah Mardam Bey 

The Wild, Wild West was in more ways than one, and author Nancy Jo Cullen reveals the saucy side of the Wild West in her autobiographical observation of Pearl Miller’s life as Calgary’s foremost Madame of the early 1900s. Pearl is a fictional account from Pearl’s own point of view, done via various styles of poetry to convey the life of a little known maverick and infamous woman of Canadian history. Pearl is Canadian poetry at its best; vibrant, intriguing, informative and even the prose has greater efficiency and intent than perhaps a novel form might render. I do believe Cullen has the blueprint for a screenplay that would possibly relate well to the screen.  

Nancy Jo Cullen seems to encapsulate the tumultuous life of Pearl in a way that the readers can see her life from all perspectives. Pearl isn’t just the whore-keeper with a heart, or a victim of her circumstances, or a poker-faced deviant of society – she is all of the above and more besides. Nancy Jo Cullen makes Pearl a three-dimensional woman with complicated experiences and a life full of joy, pain and regrets. Cullen manages to show Pearl’s evangelical reformation to a process of self-growth instead of a preachy good vs. evil. Cullen has researched the time of Pearl’s life and has put Pearl firmly amidst her surroundings of two World Wars and Prohibition. Cullen has a delicious way with words that can be both biting and tender at times; Cullen has made a complex web of poetry to examine a complex woman in history. 

Pearl is a fascinating collection of poems that has been well thought out and delivered, making this book an expressionist perspective on history that transcends to relevancy in modern day.