January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sukrita Paul Kumar was born and brought up in Kenya and at present she lives in Delhi, writing poetry, researching and teaching literature. An Honorary Fellow of International Writing Programme, University of Iowa (USA) and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she was also an invited poet in residence at Hong Kong Baptist University. She has published five collections of poems in English including Rowing Together, Without Margins and Folds of Silence.
Sukrita’s major critical works include Narrating Partition, Conversations on Modernism, The New Story and Man, Woman and Androgyny. Some of her co-edited books are Ismat, Her Life, Her Times, Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature and Women’s Studies in India: Contours of Change. As Director of a UNESCO project on “The Culture of Peace”, she edited Mapping Memories, a volume of Urdu short stories from India and Pakistan. She has two books of translations, Stories of Joginder Paul and the novel Sleepwalkers. She is the chief editor of the book on Cultural Diversity in India published by Macmillan India and prescribed by the University of Delhi.
A recipient of many prestigious fellowships and residencies, Sukrita has lectured at many universities in India and abroad. A solo exhibition of her paintings was held at AIFACS, Delhi. A number of Sukrita’s poems have emerged from her experience of working with homeless people.
A Tale Untold
(Dedicated to Sadhna Naithani)
This way or that way
Whichever way
Chaubeji looked
Tales spilled over
Tales told and retold
Squirrels scurrying out of
his eyes, his ears
Baby hedgehogs stumbling from
his hairy nostrils
Stories climbing up his legs
Nawabs and begums
Rajas and ranis crawling all
Over him as red ants
Their pinpricks and bites
Traveling from Gopalpur
To London and back
In English
the spice and sting
softened on entering
the white ears
of William Crooke
Ladoos became chocolates
mogra turned bluebells
The many tongues of
Pandit Ramgharib Chaube
Flapped smartly,
From Avadhi, Braj, Khadi boli
Bhojpuri and even Sanskrit
And Persian
To the language of Englishsthan
Fanning people’s imagination
from the times of creation
in the United Provinces
More and even more
Stories surfaced
from deep tunnels of memories
and poured into the
already full cauldron of
Chaube’s mind
The mind that swung
into swirls
and circles of insanity;
Invisible to history
a whole century deaf
He lay mummified
Packed between the covers
Of his handwritten book of tales
Until stirred by the smell of
Ink in the pen of a fellow traveler
Once again
The squirrels came scurrying
out of his eyes
And the pigeons flew from his ears
In the Folklore Society of London.
Memories
Your shriveled
Winter bark
Is a mere mask over
Those chirpy moments, tunnels of
Dense exchanges, breezy quarrels
Those hours of snow meditations
We soared through the skies
To the sounds of
The universe
The autumnal fall
cannot shed them all
Remember,
I am not the summer green of your
Leaves that comes, teasing you
Again and yet again
On this wakeful
winter morning
I see it all
You are in fact
Empty of your ghost…
I see it all
Today too
Wrapped in that same
green shawl
That ageless spirit
Emerges from the nowhere
Of tall keekers of
Jehanpanah,
Gently stepping
through rows of shadowy trees
as on other mornings
tiptoeing
thief-like
in search for another form
an oak, a chinar or
perhaps a peepal
The birds twitter
on my branches
As the mountains slide
into the jungles
on the plains.
To You, Whoever
I hear you in the
Veins of the peepal leaf
Loud and clear
Lit up in the grains of sand
in the afternoon sun
blinding.
I see you appear
In the ripple of the
Baby’s giggle
When you slither back into
the snake hole
I know
the world will end.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Graham Nunn is a Brisbane based writer, co-founder of Small Change Press and a founding member of Brisbane’s longest running poetry event, SpeedPoets (www.speedpoets.org). He is the current QLD editor of Blue Dog: Australian Poetry Journal and is the Secretary of the Australian Haiku Society (www.haikuoz.org). He has published 4 collections of poetry. His latest collection, Ruined Man is now available from www.smallchangepress.com.au
Hide
among cheap thin-walled rooms
stuffed full of sweating fat men
trying to remember old dreams
the rain all afternoon all evening
its quiet rhythmic sound
before it grew too dark I watched
pigeons drink their own reflection
the room elongated the fourth wall
too distant or too dark to see
no moths at the window
only a swaying power line
raindrops dripping from it
one red spot fading on my thigh
where a flea from the mattress
shared my warmth my loneliness
and returned into the weave
Break Away
i.
This landscape folds in on itself. Everything that
moves – wind, dust, laughter – changes. Streets
soften. Sunlight plays across glass, but windows
appear blank unless viewed from within. Walls
begin to sweat & sour. We give it up & go.
ii.
You’ve put on your Marilyn perfume. Our old
letters have never smelled so sweet, our
memories seemed so true. I’ve plotted our escape
to the island – dawn light breaking in the window
salt breeze carrying the ocean’s secrets.
iii.
It’s past noon and the weather can’t hold. Take off
your silence and your coat. Let’s chance it – throw
ourselves to the season. There’s a cold that starts
in certainty. You see? There’s only one thing
left to do. Sweep you off your feet.
iv.
Here’s a necklace of water, of awe. A puzzle
that began the night your mother walked
along the shore and took the ocean by its lapels.
Empty your basket of black stones. When we
arrive, sunlight will follow, the waters will calm.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anne Elvey’s poems have appeared in Antipodes, Cordite, Eureka Street, Eremos, Meanjin, PAN, and Salt Lick Quarterly. In 2008, her work was placed first in the page seventeen poetry competition and highly commended in the Max Harris Poetry Award. Her research in ecocriticism and biblical studies is supported by Melbourne College of Divinity and the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. Anne lives in Coburg, Victoria.
Love’s ghost
The egret’s poised
on a platform
of silt. While it seems
she walks on water,
she wades knee
deep, with grace to
impale the soul.
She is the sign
for a clef
between treble and bass –
not yet invented –
or perhaps above,
a body that is reeds’
song, that
when she alights is
more than air. She
hangs her plumes
on sky’s stave:
score for the orches-
tra between us. And
she breathes there,
knows other
things, but
(like you and me)
does not know
what takes flight
when you raise your
hand for silence.
Paperbark, Ashgrove
Dense with tenderness your layered skin is ragged
as if torn by an ancestral scribe
and laid tuck against tuck against trunk,
the innocent flesh shed and held –
like a word you might say about yourself –
as wind breathes against your weeping delicate leaves
that eat the light.
Your body drinks
and deep inside remakes the soil and sun.
So two crows call that you have called them here
and your wood’s joy
at their impertinence
erupts
in peels of flesh.
Is it strip me you say?
Or do colonial eyes see paper where flesh is?
Did your shedding call older hands to ochre?
What is this breath that lifts like a curtain
your lanceolate leaves
where each one’s caress
pierces the space it defines?
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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joanne burns is a writer of poetry, including prose poems; short fictions; and monologues. Over a dozen collections of her work have been published. Her most recent poetry collection an illustrated history of dairies Giramondo Publishing 2007 was shortlisted for the 2008 NSW Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize. kept busy, a cd recording of joanne burns reading a selection of her work, was produced by River Road Press, also in 2007. A new collection of her work ‘amphora’ will be published by Giramondo Publishing in 2010. She lives in Sydney.
answer for Tatjana Lukic
death
a fine gold corridor
you float down on an
early sunday morning –
your big day out – then lift
to somewhere like a butterfly
that’s shed her latinations,
into the hums, the whirrings,
sussurations, drifts of astral
air
you will appear and reappear
i hear the rhythms of your
words as you disappear into
the here and there and every
where, new breaths streaming
with the shimmer of your colours,
no ‘little silly things’, you wear
the big things now [with flair]
thought waves its love in every
colour
August 13th 2008
note: ‘little silly things’ was Tatjana’s description of artworks she was making, mentioned in an email on July 30th 2008
ladoo
could this be a poem
of four hands like ganesha
the hindu god who has that
many [or even fourteen]
ganesh ganapati elephant
god of good fortune wisdom
removal of obstacles sweet god of
writers, a kind of spiritual teddy
bear though never close enough for
a hug; he has his hands full with serious
things eyes black pools of a potent mind,
an elephant buddha not snuggleup bear
remover of obstacles desire & pain, one hand
holds an axe the next a whip; one hand for a blessing,
that lotus in the other realising itself: he’s a handy man
no nails required, a bundle of gifts with a generous belly
that absorbs protects, a mini-phleroma a gnostic ganesh
riding his mouse, this tiny mooshikam, what does it
mean: smart rodent assistant sniffing cryptic gems,
a too proud egomind needing gee’s stewardship –
a pantry of meaning, in the mythopoeisis nook;
from all accounts gee likes a ladoo or four, something
sweet to suck on as he listens for clues with those
capacious ears, vivekananda [before there were two]
i like ganesh best when he stands, one foot raised
above the ground, a fuller measure of his grace; my
unopened ganesh jigsaw puzzle gave me no obstacles
when it sat for two years below three brass figures of
his dancing self, the pieces slipped together quicker
than the washing up; he reclines on the table lit
by the shine of five ghee lamps; if you used his image
as a coaster or a placemat would he stop you eating or
drinking too much, would he take you to task –
what a task he completed with his missing tusk,
as scribe of vyasa’s vast mahabharata, in his rush
to get started snapping a tusk off to use as a pen, he
never paused for a break – a true ur god
no seventh day of rest
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Geoff Page is an Australian poet who has published eighteen collections of poetry as well as two novels, four verse novels and several other works including anthologies, translations and a biography of the jazz musician, Bernie McGann. He retired at the end of 2001 from being in charge of the English Department at Narrabundah College in the ACT, a position he had held since 1974. He has won several awards, including the ACT Poetry Award, the Grace Leven Prize, the Christopher Brennan Award, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for Poetry and the 2001 Patrick White Literary Award. Selections from his work have been translated into Chinese, German, Serbian, Slovenian and Greek. He has also read his work and talked on Australian poetry in throughout Europe as well as in India, Singapore, China, Korea, the United States and New Zealand.
Ruminations
for Marie Dacke
1.
Though not a happy clapper, I
still praise the filigree of things,
those traceries of fine connections,
the way my friend in Lund
established in her PhD
that certain clever beetles here
(and all about the globe)
employ the moon to navigate,
rolling out their spheres of dung
in straight lines from the mother lode
to feast on unopposed.
2.
I praise how they’ve ensured that I,
surrounded by the wide Monaro
(its slownesses of sheep and cattle),
can sit here in a coffee bar,
enveloped by the summer air
and, toying with my cappuccino,
measure out these lines for you
untroubled by a fly.
3.
But, then again, I have to think
about those pesky flies,
classified by Carl Linnaeus
(1758),
a genus that’s done 65
million circuits round the sun —
and so to those Monaro cattle,
obliging both the fly and beetle
(the Musca and its moonshine rival)
with all the manna of their dung,
those cattle with their destinations …
protein with a price per kilo.
4.
Not a simple story really —
but let’s not spoil a cappuccino.
We tinker with our tinkering,
horologists at work (with eyepiece)
and smile at how we do not hear
the hoofprints in the room.
Allegro
We are gathered in a room
for violin and piano:
two young female Swiss musicians
and fifty-five or so of us
convened by invitation,
waiting for the strings
to variously be bowed and struck.
I let my eye run down the program:
dates of birth and dates of death;
that hyphen in between.
So much a small mark may reveal
expanded on the stave.
Outside, through the picture window,
a last sun shows the rhododendrons
as, suddenly, in this still moment
I see the room fill up with death:
the slowness of a lifetime’s cancer;
a final swearword on the freeway;
the cloudy whirling of a sky
around the heart attack.
The options ramify like roots
out into the room,
fingers thinning into nothing.
Conceivably, we’ll go together,
one death wrought from light and sound,
a man quite suddenly among us,
his coat too heavy for the weather.
The first piece starts; they’re blonde and gifted —
and not without some humour.
Conducting us by choice and voice
across two centuries of Europe,
they’re celebrating all those hyphens
between the bookends birth and death.
We know, of course, the one date only —
although a few are stooped perhaps
with what their doctor’s said already.
Those last four digits grow remote,
as if immeasurably deferred
by what we’re hearing in the strings.
Struck or bowed, each note sustains us
even as it shouts or whispers
rumours of the end.
The Swoop
Every day
it has to happen.
Why is it that with
so much ease
a magpie sweeps
in front of you
as if connecting
up two trees?
You’re doing 60
kph;
it makes its long low
easy swoop
as if to laz-
ily complete
some half-arsed sort of
loop the loop.
It’s graceful, yes,
but snooty, too;
you hear a brain of
thimble size
declaring in a
quiet hauteur,
You’re much too easy
to despise,
you shadow in your
shiny car.
Can you hope to
equal this?
Whether you
speed up or brake,
your bumper bar
will always miss.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
A recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award and Commonwealth Poetry Award, Keki N. Daruwalla has so far published about 12 books, consisting of mostly poems and a couple of fictional works. Some of his important works are Under Orion, The Keeper of the Dead, Landscapes, A Summer of Tigers and The Minister for Permanent Unrest & other stories. He also edited Two Decades of Indian Poetry. The Library of Congress has all his books. His most recent collection is The Glass Blower. His novel For Pepper and Christ was published this year by Penguin, India.
the tribal goddess
there may or may not be a tribal goddess
but I salute her in absentia,
this goddess of the tribals of the forest
of shadows scrimmaging
on the fern floor of the forest
not just the goddess of the dark heart of the forest
but of the forest-fringe
who extends her hand
to meet the vegetal goddess,
protector of those who limp into the forest
trailing a thread of blood,
the ones who subsist on a diet of nettles,
protector against the lords of the buckshot
and the iron trap, hide-robbers, horn bandits
and the ivory thieves
the rational ones continue to despise you
as do the monotheists
who think no end of themselves
who think they are very advanced
and aeons ahead of the polytheists
and the pantheists and solar theists
and lunar- and-planet theists
but as the concrete forests rise
on concrete plinths and smoke belches forth
coating the sky’s lung
we’ll be migrating to you
in barefoot trickles at night—always night
in silence or with din
the goddess of nocturnal silence
and the nocturnal howl are the same,
one eye Capricorn and the other Cancer
you’ll shortly be in demand
for moss-masked as you are
you are the mother of secrets
goddess of the water springs
still hidden in the earth
A Dam in the Himalayas
Valley floor and flanking hills have gone under.
Roof-tiles are paved flagstones now
and shimmer and refract as they never did
whenever a light breeze smears the waters.
The blur that is the temple spire is washed and warped;
it trembles when the waters move.
The palace too has gone down with its veined marble,
— colour of sunsets, burnt sienna–
though its pillars still hold the ceiling
Atlas-like, each pillar
erupting from a carved lotus.
If an underwater flute were activated
its Garhwali melody would gurgle up
in a string of bubbles; and carp and mullet
would scuttle away thinking some water mammoth
on the lake-floor was breathing down their fins.
These are enchanted waters now, mermaid
and water-nymphs, all breast and sinuous waist
move here; flowering trees still drop petals;
kingfisher and blue-jay
sit on an underwater branch looking for prey.
These are not waters, they are mist, memory
I look for your face, your shadow here,
your body and your bier wrapped in water-weed,
but loved one, the waters close in upon
the outlines of your face, now beyond recall,
and mist and vapour rub your smile away.
Before the Word
Corn is great, on the cob or otherwise,
but before corn in the ear there was life.
Fire is holy especially for Zoroastrians,
but before fire too there was life.
Before the bowstring and the flint arrow sang,
there was life.
The word is great,
yet there was life before the word.
We can’t turn romantic and say
we were into bird speech or river-roar then,
into the silence of frost
or the language of rain.
But forest speech and swamp speech
came through easier to us.
When lightning crashed,
the cry of the marsh bird was our cry,
and we flung ourselves to the other branch
like any other baboon.
As winter whined on windy cliff,
we shivered with the yellow grass.
In winter-dark a hundred eyes
flared yellow in the jungle scrub.
When seasons changed, blood coursed with sap
and flowered in meadows. We were at home.
Nor eyes nor bat cries bothered us.
What if we didn’t know
a bat assessed reality
from the ricochet of its cry?
Though there were no words,
fear had a voice with many echoes.
Worship was quieter, adoration
spoke only through the eyes or knees.
What was it like before language dropped like dew,
covering the scuffed grass of our lives?
Fish
The sea came in with her and her curved snout
and her tin coloured barnacles
and long threaded rose moles
patterned on her body.
The sea brought her and her curved snout
and her rose moles and her eyes still translucent
as if half aware and half unaware
of the state of her body.
The sea came in with her and her scimitar snout
and her translucent eyes
graying into stone.
The sea brought her in,
wrapped in seaweed
and slapped her on the sand,
all five feet of her
with the armour of her scales
and the filigree of her rose moles.
The tide kept coming in
but couldn’t disturb her
or her resting place—
she was so heavy.
The sea fell back, but even
as the thin-edged foam line receded,
it went to her once more with a supreme effort,
rummaged among her barnacles
and left.
Lorca
Dawn will come as it always has,
escorted with pearls,
the earth-chalice
spiked with frost.
Sandwiched between your rivers
‘one lament and the other blood’,
the land will flame like a tongue
of fiery green
threading the Sierras.
The bullring will pulse with blood;
the red dust will still whirl
and eddy across the road;
evenings will be as they were before—
light-rose or mauve-shadow
or smeared with iodine,
and chalked with the flight of cranes.
Nightscapes will still be the same:
bars of flamenco carried by the wind
goatherds round a fire
and sheepdogs barking
at the rustle of dry oak leaves.
Only you will not be there.
“Before the Word”, “Fish”, and “Lorca” first appeared in Collected Poems 1970-2005 (Penguin, 2006)
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Belinda Lopez is a young Australian journalist working in Jakarta, Indonesia. Between writing stories and editing for an English-language newspaper in the capital, she has been hiking her way around the many islands of the country, jotting down poetry as she goes.
To Philip Larkin, from Singapore
With the promise of clean,
I was morally confronted
by sex shops, and fingers
entwined on trains.
Even still, sterility ran me inside-
a blessing I was alone,
I dived into solitude
like a finely sculpted boy,
I lunged in a store
where books are hailed the profit,
pushed past a muddled mess of man
who’d found solace in little words
strung together,
and I searched for you,
L, L, L,
tongue flicking my palette fast.
Found an anthology from home
unknowns- even for poets-
that doesn’t matter,
they wrote of Glebe
and left-wing smells
you would have found it bum
so I didn’t buy it.
Oh God, I wanted to feel
Sappho Cafe and messy dusk
tuned to the love songs of
social invalids.
But you weren’t there.
So I left with E. E. Cummings
feeling like I’d taken home the wrong man.
Ibu
Morning calls draw her up from bed
an icy splash to shock her into life
she refuses the hot water in the house.
And Allah takes in prayer as
cracked barefeet genuflect,
soles up to the unrisen sun.
Underneath her head scarf
her hair is black silk,
She removes the tattered cloth
and it falls around her like in the movies
and a woman of 40 is 18 again
dark eyes and cheekbones to the stars,
is this what he sees in crossed pictures,
before he delivers blue circles,
despair for emptiness and poverty,
sweat and truth:
that he is nothing, and she has the strength
he can only dream of in bubbly visions?
The source
At parties I know politics like table manners
Our egos are champagne glasses
drink up, name drop
and see who’ll gulp it down.
The secret is subtlety
never mind that I tally up the
mentions in the rags.
Now at night I hold a pillow, not a
a spouse with good connections.
20 years ago I would be lapping up the
giggles, her watching me wriggle
like a worm between the sheets
I would have stopped for a blue
sky and wondered if something
bigger made it and smelt a beggar’s
musty breathe and felt my stomach sink
in love for him.
Now ecstasy is musty paper
with rows of little lines.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ana Blandiana was born Otilia-Valeria Coman on 25th March 1942 in Timiºoara, Romania and adopted her pen name at seventeen with the publication of her first poem. After marrying editor Romulus Rusan in 1960 she attended the faculty of philology in Cluj-Napoca.
Ana Blandiana
I first heard of the poet Ana Blandiana as a child in Romania when the popular starlet Margareta Pâslaru sang her famous poem Lasã-mi toamnã frunze verzi, (Leave me green leaves Autumn.) Later, in the 1980s, when I was dissatisfied with life in my country of birth, Blandiana appeared again in my consciousness with poems that young people could relate to. However, I did not realise the full extent of her involvement in arts, and especially politics, until two decades later. By then I had fled communist Romania, made a new life in Australia and begun my research into Eastern European poets.
Translation is generally considered detrimental to the original work because of the loss of the original rhyme, rhythm and expression. However, I would argue that Ana Blandiana’s poetry is translated into English to advantage. Romanian is a romantic language and the word choice, its inflection, sound and particular connotation can outstrip the content in importance. Ana Blandiana’s original poems have an enthralling rhyme and rhythm. The translations allow the reader to focus on what the author is saying rather than the way in which they say it. When reading Blandiana’s poetry, understanding content is crucial in order to appreciate the poem’s beauty and profundity.
The political context in Romania at the time had a significant influence on Ana Blandiana’s work. Her poetry expressed the concerns of an oppressed nation that would otherwise face severe repercussions. She is best known for her use of the extended metaphor with which she masked her criticism. “Hibernare” (Hibernation) comments on the nation’s ignorance and unwillingness to act by depicting them at the border of sleep: “Don’t listen to my brothers, they sleep. / Not understanding their own shouted words, / While they scream like some approving wild beasts.”
In 1985 she became known, nationally and internationally, for her most controversial anti-communist poetry. At the insistence of the student editors of the Bucharest magazine Amfiteatru, Blandiana submitted a group of four anti-communist poems. One of them was Eu Cred (I Believe), in which she reinvents her nature theme:
I believe that we are a botanic nation
Otherwise, where do we get this calmness
In which we await the shedding of our leaves?
She was sufficiently popular to demand the world’s attention in case of political persecution since, in the words of Romanian editor Musat, “Popular poets had a special status; an aura [of] which they took advantage” (Musat). Blandiana was banned from publishing nationally after Ceauºescu became aware of the poems’ seditious content. In 1985 she sent Totul (All,) a reflection on everyday Romanian life, abroad to be published in samizdat, in different western newspapers and later broadcasted on Radio Free Europe. The Independent in Britain devoted their first page to a translation of the poem and provided an interpretation of its surrealist prose. As a result, the communist authorities placed a ban on books containing her name and poetry, which lasted from 1985 to 1988.
In an interview with Naomi Frandzen, Blandiana reveals that, like many public personalities at the time, she was tempted to flee Romania (Frandzen) but her poem “Cetina” (The Fir Tree) discloses her fear that, once departed, she could not return:
They cannot leave, not even as ghosts.
Around them water and sky migrate
The wind asks constantly: “Don’t you go?”
The fir tree sobs: “I’m home.”
The political context created a personal dilemma as she strove to balance her poetic integrity with political demands. Among the many early poems that showcased her romantic style she wrote “Torquato Tasso,” as a result of her study of the Italian poet and in response to her early experience with the censorship which was run by Directia Presei (The Press Department). In an interview published by the National Journal Online in 2005 she revealed that “[with censure] we had to always negotiate, to renounce. About my first book I cannot even say with all my heart that it is mine, that much the censor intervened” (Viata Mea E Un Roman: Amintirile Anei Blandiana.) In “Torquato Tasso” she reflects on the absence of truth in poetry and society and her role as a poet to uphold it:
Through the night he came towards me, he,
The poet failed by fear.
He was very handsome.
You could see the poetry in his body, like an x-ray film.
Poetry unwritten out of fear.
Even without political implications her poetry was contentious, delving in philosophy, religion and morality. Although she tried to incorporate the truth as she saw it, her willingness to succeed in a literary career and her new status as a poet did not allow for complete freedom of expression. “Each Move” reveals her dilemma:
Each of my moves
Is seen
Simultaneously in many mirrors,
Each look I take
Meets with itself
Several times,
Until
I forget which is
The true one,
And who
Mocks me.
In a society where communal harmony was claimed to be upheld, she questions the role of poetry, revealing its controversial and untameable nature, which lends it a sense of notoriety:
I hear how someone steps behind me in eternity
And plants words in the wake of my soles,
A wise step – quotation marks,
A wrong step – poetry.
After the December uprising in 1989 and the execution of Ceauºescu, Blandiana’s ban was officially lifted and she continued publishing. She also reopened the Romanian branch of the worldwide association of writers, PEN, in 1990, and over the years founded numerous projects and organisations aimed at preserving freedom of speech and opposing the persecution of writers.
Her early work and the poetry written after the 1989 revolution are characterised by nature and emotion as pure expressions of life. It resembles the youthful preoccupation with love, self discovery and romanticism in cultural desert produced by oppression and lack of freedom of speech. “Rain Chant” celebrates youth as it compares sexuality with nature: “
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s raining
And I look good with rain’s locks in my hair.
I am the most beautiful woman because it’s windy,
And the dress desperately struggles to cover my knees
As well as displaying an intense awareness of life, her poetry has several dominant thematic elements including morality, religion and spirituality. The dominant religion in Romania is Romanian Orthodox Christianity; “Pieta,” published in 1969, reflects on faith through the confusion of Jesus Christ’s mother at his death:
Clear pain, death returned me,
To your breast subdued, almost a child.
You do not know if you should thank
Or cry
For this happiness,
Mother.
Her latest volume, Refluxul sensurilor (The Senses’ Reflux) was published in 2004 and marks four decades of literary work. The poetry brings her work full circle as it deals with themes from her early poetry. Birth-death, beginning-end and youth-old age persist underneath mundane life and under the tone of calm elegy. Having retired from political life, she embodies personal moralities in images of night, sea and church bells, symbols that recur throughout her poetry. “Thistles and Gods” reflects upon time and mortality:
All time is only a day…
There is no past, no future,
An eternal today, stunning,
With the sun above unmoving
Unable
To measure
Immortality’s failure.
During her career Ana Blandiana won a number of literary awards, including the Poetry Award from the Romanian Writers Union (1969), the Writers Union Award for Children’s Literature (1980), the Gottfried Von Herder Award (1982) and the Mihai Eminescu National Award for Poetry (1997) (e.Informativ.ro). These awards, together with a significant body of inspirational work, assure her an honoured place in world literature.
Notes
Alianþa Civicã Romana. General Information. c2006. Civic Alliance. Available:
http://ww e.Informativ.ro, Sursa ta de Informare.
Cultura Romaniei, Ana BlandianaBiografie.n.d.e.informativ.ro.
Frandzen, Naomi. "Interview with Ana Blandiana." Lingua Romana: a Journal of French, Italian and Romanian Culture. 1.1 (2003): 1-10.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Fiona Wright is a Sydney writer, whose poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anothologies in Australia, Asia and the USA. In 2007, she was resident at the Tasmanian Writers Centre, developing a series of poems about Australian soldiers in Sri Lanka, and in 2008 she was runner-up in the John Marsden National Young Writers Award. Fiona works as an editor for Giramondo Publishing and HEAT Magazine, and a Project Assistant for the Red Room Company.
The Driver
Oh, he can’t speak English
Mrs says when I ask for his name.
I wake
to his stiff sweeping, the white gravel garden
bared to the first sun. Loudhailers writhe
with morning prayers,
the taximen blessed
over the smokesong of their engines.
He pulls her aging BMW
through cowsome backstreets,
the corrugations of fences
barely squeezing past side mirrors,
Cliff Richard crooning through her tapedeck.
His questions fall soft, and askance.
The afternoon heat,
he busies in the garden, burning
rubbish, painting windowsills,
resetting shards of glass along the wall.
Sometimes, I see his gaze absent
through the slatted windows
of the main house,
where Mrs moves her dark outline
from kitchen, to table, to easy chair,
the ceiling fan
struggling at the waist-line frill
of her ossariya.
Crossing
First, the dust cross-pollinates.
Guards in saggy khaki scratch
their noses, phlegm-spit
before their stamps rubber
onto our watermarked papers.
The road is thick. Wads of paper money.
Laundry bags,
and swift exchanges,
the litter of planky rickshaws
and the speeding limbs of cobble-chested boys.
They drag past crates of cigarettes, munitions
and pickled pythons, their bulb-like elders
broadly beam and sweep their hands
at pink casinos.
Ribby women swagger under gemstones
and rub their tongues over their teeth:
Perhaps there is no law
but human enterprise, the thick illicit
and a price for everything.
Fruit Market
Vast bald marrows, frilled mushrooms
make us marsupial. We scamper,
the greens hustling from the woodwork.
Wheeled baskets stalk. Their leathery muscle
snaps at careless ankles.
The whiplash of green bins, cornsilks
and macheted heads of cabbages, we duck
and weave our way, as the small teeth
of asparagus grate.
Knobbled and gossiping fingers
pull at thin bean strings. The backpacks
are bulbous, sometimes sprouting.
The crate-jawed men compere, their howls
reverberate and crash against the foliage:
one dollar one dollar cheapest
cheapest cheapest
try sweet lady, sweet sweet
sweet pear, try before you buy
The smell of fish curls on the edges.
We gather, alertly herbivorous
and chew on cherry tomatoes.
The seeds burst like blood in our mouths.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973
By Juan Garrido Salgado
Translated by Stuart Cooke
Picaro Press
ISBN 978-1-920957-39-1
Warners Bay, 2007
Order Copies from www.picaropress.com
Reviewed by HEATHER TAYLOR JOHNSON
Once Poemas, Septiembre 1973 (Eleven Poems, September 1973) reads like a narrative of collected single poems. Though not a verse novel, it tells the inside story of a Superpower’s super power over a democratic nation. It is not a cozy read and does not induce smiles. But it is a well written vision of a time the author does not wish us to forget and in that, it is important and it is passionate and that is enough.
It was all terror in September,
no peace in the cemeteries.
The resistance became the shadows
and the light against a war never declared.
(7) “Made in the USA”
For most people, September 11 is a date that brings to mind New York City, terrorist attacks in the form of hijacked airplanes crashing into buildings, people jumping from those buildings as they burned to the ground. Lesser known in history, it is also the date of the Chilean coup d-etat.
With the assistance of the United States of America, Augusto Pinochet’s military killed then President Salvador Allende and created a more ‘democratic’ Chile, one in which over a hundred thousand suspected leftist dissidents would be arrested and an estimated 3,000 would ‘disappear’ or be murdered. Torture was commonplace and censorship became a way of life. Poet Juan Garrido Salgado was one of those dissidents who not only succumbed to the censoring of his poetry, but also to imprisonment and torture. His latest collection is a reminder to his readers that September 11 was a dreadful date long before 2001.
The collection begins with a poem entitled ‘Made in the USA’:
Our fiesta for socialism
awoke a child of fear in the North.
Chile, after all, is a long, narrow playground
where the transnationals can frolic freely
in the free market.
The collection comes full circle as it closes with a poem simply titled ‘September 11, 1973’, in which the words ‘Made in the USA’ stand alone between each stanza, the repetition a lamentable refrain:
Santiago, September 11, 1973,
was a dark spring
of terror, flames and fumes.
Two jets
flew like the evil wings of death.
Made in the USA.
Soldiers in the streets formed part
of a scaffold of violence from the sky,
rivers of blood ran through our mouths.
Made in the USA.
I remember hearing Salgado read both of those poems only months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and I remember feeling appalled with his timing (though I had been in Australia for two years, I am a native to America and in many ways felt emotionally raw and quick to defend my country after the 9-11-01 attacks). In hindsight, I see that the timing could not have been more ideal for Salgado. His emotions, after twenty-eight years, were also raw and his need to defend his country was not up for debate. I particularly remember the fervor with which Salgado read the refrain ‘Made in the USA’, as if he could spit and cry all at once.
What lies between the pages of those two poems are nine other poems depicting the public history of Chile’s darkest days, told by a voice who claims the misery as only one personally affected can. There are instances of hope among the painful shadows, though these glimpses are often hidden and undervalued as the lingering effect is ultimately horrific. In such cases common metaphors of flight, for instance, are confused between violence and freedom, as birds take on the form of heavy airplanes and the ethereal howls of tortured men, while at the same time signifying the dreams of those who struggle against the regime. More straightforward is a second image of fire, and there is no uncertainty here. The consequences of fire are a reliable evil: the burning of humans, books, beds, souls; the burning of verses of poems, photographs of the living, the guitar of famous folk singer Victor Jara just before his death; the burning of socialism; the burning of spring; coals in the heart; coals on the skin. And in each written memory ablaze, it is impossible to disassociate Salgado from the anguish. We become his witnesses and his pupils, though he never begs our pity.
Everything was pain in September,
the leaves condemned to cruelty
with the words of the dictator:
'Not a single leaf moves in this country if I do not move it.'
(11) "The Dictator's Autumn"
To add to the authenticity of the collection, the left pages contain the original poem, written in Spanish, while the right holds the English version, translated by Stuart Cooke. Salgado is himself a translator (he translated MTC Cronin’s Talking to Neruda’s Questions for Chile’s Safo Press), though the difficulty in translating one’s own life perhaps could have been a bit overwhelming. To the eyes of a reviewer who is fairly competent with the basics of Spanish, the English verse does not compare with its Spanish companion; though that is not a problem with the translation but more so with the flow of the Spanish language and the choppiness of the English. However, even if one cannot read Spanish, it is important to have the two poems side by side. Translation here can be seen to be as much about the validity of the emotion (as a poet who has not only lost his country but his language and refuses to let go of its substance) as it is about the vernacular. What jumps out for me with the side-by-side juxtaposition of the single poem in two languages is the substantiation of an identity lost.
soy todo el hombre
en llamas por quién sabe quién.
Secundos preciosos para este poema
que escribo,
que duele…
(22) "Soy todo el hombre el hombre herido por quién sabe quién"
then the companion piece…
I am every man,
burning for who knows who.
Precious seconds for this poem I'm writing.
What pain…
(23) "I am every man, the man wounded by who knows who"
This is Salgado’s fourth collection of poetry and it is no surprise that the subject matter has not veered too far from centre. If writers tend to work out their demons through words, then I expect this will not be the last reference made to political imprisonment by the poet. The strength of Once Poemas is found in the delicate mixture of the factual and the imagistic – which readers will recognise as true fodder for verse. Emotion melds together with the concrete and Salgado has managed to create a very political, very personal collection that is neither irate nor sentimental. Its directness is alarming; its use of metaphor soothing. I say it is an ardent collection, a significant work of great historical weight. Buy it, read it, place it in your bookshelf for all to see and when friends and family come around, pass it onto them. Let others know of the struggle and the pain of an earlier September 11 and of the exquisiteness of a once silenced writer set free to sing.