Al-Khemia Poetica: A Women's Arts and Writing Journal: Salt Publishing

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Shaindel Beers' The Children's War and Other Poems

This is the end of the innocence – Don Henley

Part of the poet's “job” description is to record historical content – and Shaindel Beers' The Children's War and Other Poems (copyright 2013 Salt Publishing), chronicles the loss of innocence through war's violent variations: internal/external genocide, person against society, person against themselves.

The Children's War, as its title promises, provides the reader with a series of brutal ekphrastic poems that successfully extrapolate the annihilation of innocence through children's eyes, either through drawings/paintings made by children who've survived war, or photographs taken of child refugees. As no one, (at least a normal person), reacts to a child's pain without a mixture of anger and discomfort, the first half of The Children's War is almost impossible to read. Beers throws down the gauntlet: though the language is spare - like a child's - the feelings, the emotions, the empathy stirred within the heart of the reader - are not. There is a primal, raw power in Beers' poems, which can't be circumvented; the reader is put on the spot as a child's pain and loss take center stage, as in the poem “After Martija's Watercolor, Croatia”:

There are things that can happen that you can't draw.

A soldier ripping off the baby's diaper and slamming him

in tot he wall because it will be easier if the baby

cannot cry. Your mother without a head. Your paint splotches.

Green and blue are peaceful. That was before.

Now, everything is red. The red mixed with the green

becomes a sickening brown. The brown that covered

your thighs when a soldier was done with you.

The second half of the book “Other Poems,” continue on with the same theme, but on a more universal scale; loss of innocence through love betrayed (“Love Poem for the Other Woman'); the discovery that one's parents are human after all (“Origins”); the loss of childhood talismans at the hands of bullies (“Ode to Plastic Ball and Bat”), and the loss of one's passion (“The Last Ballet Class Before the Operation). Beers narrative tone lightens – somewhat - in the second half of The Children's War, yet, the poems are just as compelling, and unforgettable.

Clearly, The Children's War and Other Poems is NOT for everyone. It's for the brave reader, one to match the fortitude of a poet like Beers', who offers, unflinchingly, a reminder that while the world we live in is an ugly place, there is still great beauty to be found in the depths of sorrow, honesty, and, in never forgetting our humanity.

Sunday, February 17, 2013

"The Angel of Salonika," by Vesna Goldsworthy

I'm not in the habit of reviewing older titles, but, after ordering VesnaGoldsworthy's The Angel of Salonika (© 2011 Salt Publishing/winner of the Crashaw Prize), I'm happy to report that my decision to read, and then review this gorgeous little poetry volume was the correct one.

Goldsworthy, a Serbian poet who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, and, later, emigrated to London, has captured and chronicled the themes of love, loss, memory, and rediscovery that originated from a summer spent in Greek Macedonia (“Salonika” is an ancient name for Thessaloniki), thirty years previous.

Salonika, as Goldsworthy notes in her afterward, is a cultural gateway to The Balkans; this is the perfect backdrop for Goldsworthy to set up a dual travelogue; the outward landscape mirrors the poet's internal journey. The poet is often in the act of departing for other places (“Departure Board,” “Germany”) or, saying farewell to a loved one/times past (“Notebooks,” “Yugoslav Noctures”). The best poems, in my opinion, are the ones where Goldsworthy engages in the act of transformation; her own, while at the same time, acknowledges the transformations of those persons in her life who no longer fit the familiar boundaries the mind employs to solidify relationships, as in the poem, “He Stands so Thin and Waits”:

I take my spectacles off

Before the ink line of his limbs

Emerge from the crowd

Before the smile closes his eyes

Below the clock at Waterloo

Half way between

A Giacometti and a Meissen Chinaman

He stands so thin and waits

Yet I am the fragile, the much sutured one

This time, shall we...

His question bleeds

Into the departure

Of the one forty two

For fear of being early

I am the one who is late

Who takes the last few steps

Like someone who hasn't walked before

But how are you, I ask

And hold his hand for a moment

In what I hope feels like a handshake

We do not touch

Thereafter

We do not touch

I'm not often bowled over by a poet's use of language (in this case, English) that's not written in their native tongue. Oftentimes, poets for whom English is not their native language rely on the help of translators, or, spend a great deal of time carefully constructing poems that are burdened with layers of scholarly formalism. That can't be said of Salonika. Goldsworthy has transformed the guttural soul of English into something finer, more lovely than English has a right to be, yet, her poetry is immediate and accessible, as in the poem “Out of the Blue”:

I remember

My father's kiss

A drop of wax on my

Left shoulder

A feather

Floating away

Somewhere to the side

The light

Over the archipelago

You get too close

Even so cautiously

That is

The secret of entropy

The sky and the makeshift

Miracles

In it

All

Irreversible

The Angel of Salonika, as a travelogue, and as a first collection of poems written in English by Vesna Goldsworthy, deserves a permanent place on every reader's shelf.