I read mainly poetry during summer and autumn, brand
new works and old ones, both English and Italian. All enchanting, here are some
of them.
Plum by Elizabeth Burns (Wayleave Press
2016)
I wrote about Elizabeth’s work several times in this
blog. Her pamphlet Clay was
shortlisted for the 2016 Ted Hughes Award and was runner up for the 2016 Callum
Mcdonald Memoria Award. Plum was
published last summer, a posthumous gift to her readers; the poems were found
and collected by family and friends after her death.
It is a sequence of superbly crafted poems
describing a plum tree through the seasons. They are short, intense poems in
couplets and triplets, their poignant images stand out in the sparing verses. The
beauty of these poems is in the careful choice of words and their sounds. They
express meanings that go far beyond a simple description of a tree and its
fruits and dig deeply into the core significance of our life.
I read some of them at an open mic at the New Inn in
Send. Elizabeth’s voice echoed in my ears, her presence beside me:
how
much they want the sun
to
turn their green skins
yellow,
pink, purple
how
their riper colours
come
in a rush, a rash, a blush
a
mottling of pink
the
first taste –
sweet
yellow flesh
around
the stone
....
the
tree grows bare
closes
in on itself
for
winter
snow
lies along the branches
covering
the places
where
buds will come
The
door to colour
by Myra Schneider (Enitharmon Press 2014)
Myra’s rich, narrative poems tell the story of her unlimited
imagination, a chain of images that unravel flawless reasoning. The colours she
evokes in her poems, especially in Kaleidoscope, have the consistence of facts
filtered by experience and delivered in powerful images:
Red
is
the leaves you try to catch
as
they drop into winter, the flare
from
the Halloween turnip’s heart
that
lights up its cut-out eyes,
the
dooking for apples in water,
the
solid prize you bite into.
...
Silence
is
silver so you try to hoard it
in
your small room among books,
folders,
boxes topped with dust,
the
dangle of computer cables.
...
Pictures and everyday objects (like a spoon, a throw
or a teapot) speak to her and open an unexpected world to the reader, create
stories, make connections and reveal mysteries. The presence of some
inexplicable, though realistic entities the poet perceives in the rays of the
moon, in the fog or in a post box build a bridge between real and unreal, dream
and ordinary:
Spoon
A
crucible for salt grains, ground pepper,
a
dab of mustard, it speaks of moon –
not
a harvest moon hanging heavy
as
cow udders, but winter’s glinting coin.
...
The uncanny becomes familiar. Her poems convey the
joy of being alive and discovering a new perspective on everyday life.
Folle, folle, folle di amore
per te by Alda Merini (Salani editore 2015)
I wrote about Alda Merini in the past. I go back to
her poems again and again, fascinated by her words of love that strikingly
contrast with her excruciating life. This book (Crazy, crazy, crazy in love
with you) is a collection of her love poems ‘for young lovers’, says the
subtitle. In fact, it communicates a mature disenchanted idea of love, a
sentiment explored both in its carnal and spiritual sides. Her femininity is
ambivalent, maternal and passionate, vulnerable and aggressive. She is always
aware of her fragility and vulnerable exposure when she falls in love,
nevertheless her feelings are unconditional under all circumstances, even
abuse. But at the same time she can be demanding and cruel, a predatory side
that manifests itself with total abandon. Her last word is of total acceptance,
our most basic instincts combined with a spiritual yearning she never denies.
Naked, exposed to the reader, a mad woman deprived of everything, who takes her
identity back, loving without limits. This is her revenge and her salvation.
Here are some examples of her touching poetry:
A volte Dio
uccide gli amanti
perché non vuole
essere superato
in amore
(Sometimes
God kills lovers because he doesn’t want to be surpassed in love)
Io ero un Uccello
dal bianco ventre
gentile,
qualcuno mi ha tagliato la gola
per riderci sopra
non so.
…
Ma anche distesa per terra
io canto ora per te
le
mie canzoni d’amore.
(I
was a bird with a gentle white belly, somebody cut my throat to laugh on it, I
don’t know.
But
even lying on the ground I sing now for you my love songs)
Così ti fermerei
e potrei disegnarti
un arabesco sul cuore
(Perché t’amo,
Because I love you)
(I’d
stop you like this and draw an arabesque on your heart)
Dibattendoci come due rettili infami
mentre perdiamo l’anima
(Writhing like two vile reptiles while we lose our
souls)
Eating
fire
by Margaret Atwood (Virago 2010)
This is a collection of selected poems from 1965
till 1995, it includes: Circle Games
(1966), The animals in the Country
(1968), The Journals of Susanna Moodie
(1970), Procedures for underground
(1970), Power Politics (1970), You are happy (1974), Two-headed poems (1978), True stories (1981), Interlunar (1984) and Morning in the burned house (1995).
It’s a political kind of poetry, tough, direct and
punchy. It’s also very readable, sometimes almost prose like; the rhythm is
dictated by the abrupt line breaks, the bewildering rhetorical questions, the
wittiness and extreme irony of his verses that turn ordinary life and common
beliefs upside down. These are the techniques she uses to show how things
really are.
This collection from the 60s describe the crisis of
the relationship with her first husband and refer to a more general crisis
between man and woman. The lines are short, unexpectedly broken, to reflect
lack of communication, alienation and fruitless search for identity:
I
want the circle
broken
(The circle Games vii)
There
is no centre;
the
centres
travel
with us unseen
like
our shadows
on
a day when there is no sun.
(A place: fragments vi)
Reality
is completely deconstructed, disassembled, while she tries to rebuild it in a
more authentic way. Bitter irony, unveiling the contradictions of a ruthless
world (especially ruthless with the defenceless, like women, children, animals
and nature) are the weapons Margaret Atwood uses to fight an endless battle for
fairness and justice:
Starspangled
cowboy
sauntering
out of the almost-
silly
West, on your face
a
porcelain grin,
tugging
a papier-mâché cactus
on
wheels behind you with a string,
you
are innocent as a bathtub
full
of bullets.
(Backdrop addresses Cowboy)
The
poems from Power Politics are
certainly the most famous ones, and rightly so:
you
fit into me
like
a hook into an eye
a
fish hook
an
open eye
.........
You
take my hand
I’m
suddenly in a bad movie,
it
goes on and on and
why
am I fascinated
Her
words are sharp, the images merciless and surprisingly funny, the reader is
totally engrossed in her original reasoning and unexpected questioning. This is
not just because of the pressing rhythm, the original images or the music of
the verse, but more for the surprising reality she unveils and unfalteringly
shows to us.
Some
of her lines reminded me of Frida Kahlo’s work:
Like
a deep sea
creatures
with glass bones and wafer
eye
drawn
to
the surface, I break
open,
the pieces of me
shine
briefly in your empty hands
Similarly
to her paintings, Margaret Atwood represents an inner pain using surreal images
that evoke the same feeling in the reader.
In
later works she rewrites myths, like Circe’s and Odysseus’s one, where the
Greek hero is not a heroic figure but a boastful liar, a deceiver who takes
advantage of his own friends:
One
day you simply appeared in your stupid boat,
your
killer’s hands, your disjointed body, jagged
as
a shipwreck,
skinny-ribbed,
blue-eyed, scorched, thirsty, the usual,
pretending
to be – what? a survivor?
Those
who say they want nothing
want
everything.
It
was not this greed
that
offended me, it was the lies.
(Circe/Mud poems)
In
this way Margaret Atwood reconstructs the myth from a woman’s perspective,
which can be as valid as the traditional one (the man’s perspective) where
women have been confined to the background, secluded and used by men:
When
he was young he and another boy constructed a woman out of mud. She began at
the neck and ended at the knees and elbows: they stuck to the essentials.
Differently
from Alda Merini, Margaret Atwood refuses to accept everything from men. She
feels angry, contentious and relentless in pointing out the contradictions of
man’s myths and the unfair treatments women suffer:
Break it, I tell you, Break
it. Geology wins. The layer
of
trite histories presses you down,
monotony
of stone. Oval frame.
(Head against white iv)
In
the later collections she develops two major and recurring techniques to
testify the renewed attitude women should implement, to carry on the never
ending fight against oppression and seclusion: the importance of being a
witness and the refusal to give in to romance. The heart is a ‘lump of muscle’
described with realistic unappealing details; women must bear witness of the
tortures perpetrated against them and give voice to the voiceless (‘those with
no fingers’). This is the new identity women should be committed to, a new reality,
a darkness ‘you can enter and be/as safe in as you are anywhere’ (Interlunar).
Towards
the end of this selection of poetry collections, there is the story of Mary
Webster, the woman accused of witchcraft and hanged in 1680s in Massachusetts.
She survived and lived another fourteen years. Definitely a true witness.
Il sangue amaro
by Valerio Magrelli
The title has a double meaning, it means ‘bad blood’
or ‘sour blood’ but also ‘make oneself ill over something’. What makes Valerio
Magrelli ill is definitely the present Italian social and political situation:
Giovani senza lavoro
con strani portafogli
in cui infilare denaro
che non è guadagnato.
(Il Policida I)
(Young
people without a job with strange wallets where they insert money they didn’t
earn)
He
describes ironically the half-naked showgirls in Christmas TV programs showing
off their ‘rebuilt parts’:
ed io vorrei morirti, creatura artificiale,
fra le zanne, gli artigli, la tua pelle-valuta,
irreale invenzione di chirurgia, ideale
sogno di forma pura, angelico complesso
di sesso, sesso, sesso, sesso, sesso.
(L’igienista
mentale: divertimento alla maniera di Orlan)
(and
I would like to die with you, artificial creature, between claws, talons, your
currency-like-skin, unreal invention of plastic surgery, ideal dream of pure
form, angelic ensemble of sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.)
They
are symbols of an artificial and degraded reality that apparently prevails in
today’s Italy. In a similar way the section about Christmas is emblematic of
this disillusion. The festivity is now meaningless, a promise that will never
be attained; Jesus Christ himself is the victim of his own beliefs and there is
no justice, no change and no hope in a better future. Baby Jesus might as well
turn over in his manger and have a nap:
Sta’ nella mangiatoia, accucciati su un fianco,
rimettiti a dormire, lascia perdere,
tanto lo sanno tutti, che ti aspetta la croce,
vittima, tu medesimo, di questa creazione malvagia
di cui sei lo smarrito spettatore, la preda
abbandonata sul ciglio di una curva.
(Babbo Natale gnostico)
(stay
in the manger, crouch on one side, go back to sleep, forget it, everybody knows
the cross is waiting for you; you are the victim of this evil creation, the
lost viewer, the prey abandoned at the edge of a bend)
In
Valerio Magrelli’s poetry everything is ambivalent, contradictory and this
mirrors our own feelings, desires and words:
Impaurito dall’altezza e lontano da te,
significa in ultimo:
attratto da ciò che ci separa.
Il panico di chi teme
di cadere
riflette il desiderio
di cadere,
ossia di superare il
vuoto che divide.
Tutto si intreccia,
tutto si confonde
per generare
nostalgia.
(La lettura è crudele VIII)
(scared by the height and far from you, it
means at the end to be attracted by what separates us. The panic of being
afraid of falling, that is to surpass the emptiness that divides. Everything is
intertwined, everything merges to engender nostalgia)
As
Italo Calvino writes in his wonderful book Invisible
Cities: ‘Falsehood is never in words; it is in things’.
My
favourite section of the book is the sequence of fifteen irregular rondinets (sort of rondeau, short love poems popular in 16th and 17th
century France). The broad topic is
‘rivers’, and a river is mentioned in each of them, but it’s just a pretext to
speak again about our fake myths, illusions, vain fussing and fretting. The
only thing that really counts is: ‘ascoltare chi ami’ (listening to the people
you love).
The
collection ends with a casual warning:
Sul circuito sanguigno
È come nel sistema circolatorio:
il sangue è sempre lo stesso,
ma prima va, poi viene.
Noi lo chiamiamo odio, ma è solo sofferenza,
la vena che riporta
il dono delle arterie
alla partenza.
(On blood circuit. It’s
like in the circulatory system: blood is always the same, first it goes and
then it comes back. We call it hatred, but it is only pain, the vein that
brings back the gift of the artery to the start)
The collection retraces the story of a virtuoso
violinist, George Bridgetower, son of a white European mother and a self-styled
‘African Prince’. He was discovered by Haydn and brought to England to perform
at aristocratic courts. Beethoven met Bridgetower in Vienna and composed the
Kreutzer Sonata (Violin Sonata No. 9 in A Major Op. 47) for him, originally
titled Sonata Mulattica.
Rita Dove’s work is based on historical documents,
but she also imagines the life of the young musician in England and in Austria
following his successes since he was a child prodigy. It’s a mixture of facts
and literary imagination that don’t avoid episodes of sheer discrimination.
Bridgetower was a ‘phenomenal musical talent’ since
he was ten years old, his success was mostly unexpected and the reactions of
the audience enthusiastic. The poems recreate the atmosphere of the time, the
emotions of the young musician and testify the spectators’ reactions:
...The
son, a lad of ten or twelve,
bore
a hue that seemed cast in darkest bronze;
he
was smartly dressed, possessed an admirable
restraint,
and played the Viotti concerto
with
an eloquence and refinement
rarely
delivered by his more celebrated seniors.
(Mrs. Papendiek’s Diary (1))
I
was nothing if not everything
when
the music was in me.
I
could be fierce, I could shred
the
heads off flowers for breakfast
with
my bare teeth, simply because
I
deserved such loveliness.
If
this was ambition, or hatred,
or
envy – then I was all
those
things, and so was he.
(Concert at Hanover Square)
The
verses are rich and musical, evoking for the reader Bridgetower’s own melodies.
It is ‘a tale of light and shadow’ like most stories of past and present
celebrities, of ‘heavenly music’ and profound depression:
I
step out.
I
step out into silence.
I
step out to take
my
place; my place is silence
before
I lift the bow and draw
a
fingerwidth of ache upon the air.
This
is what it is like
to
be a flame: furious
but
without weight, breeze
sharpening
into wind, a bright gust
that
will blind, flatten all of you –
yet
tender, somewhere inside
tender.
(The Performer)
The
collection ends with the most eloquent, inclusive metaphor:
...Ah,
Master
B, little great man, tell me:
How
does a shadow shine?
(The End, with
MapQuest)
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