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 Susan Connolly’s first collection of poetry For the Stranger was published by the Dedalus Press in 1993. She was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. Her second collection Forest Music was published by Shearsman Books in 2009. Shearsman published her chapbook The Sun-Artist: a book of pattern poems in 2013. She lives in Drogheda, Co. Louth. |
Shiny shine Sea scarf Mute route Walk with me (for my Dad) |
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(d’après Marc Chagall)
Version française, Elizabeth Brunazzi
La rosée découle en jade une lune aux trois quarts
L’Amour O l’amour! Ta fleur arrachée embaume
De son parfarm ma main, bientôt
bientôt me rappelant une certaine musique-
Mon destin a toujours été de quitter le lieu
où la lune dansait avec la subtile Neptune!
Tout se dissout-
sauf le souvenir de ton visage,
ton rire en pleine rue et ta danse pour la lune!
Tes bagues de jade et ta fleur sont mes bijoux,
nuançant toutes choses d’une teinte de vert, de pourpre, d’un…
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Caught in the Cross Hairs You’ve stolen my tongue  From The Geometry of Love Between the Elements by Fióna Bolger. A Grimoire published by Poetry Bus Magazine. |
cure for a sharp shock cure poem for the lovelorn |
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Fiona Bolger’s work has appeared in Headspace, Southword, The Brown Critique, Can Can, Boyne Berries, Poetry Bus, The Chattahoochee Review, Bare Hands Poetry Anthology and others. Her poems first appeared in print on placards tied to lamp posts (UpStart 2011 General Election Campaign). They’ve also been on coffee cups (The Ash Sessions). Her grimoire, The Geometry of Love between the Elements, was published by Poetry Bus Press. She is of Dublin and Chennai and is a member of Dublin Writers’ Forum and Airfield Writers.
From Poetry Bus A Grimoire is a book of magic and what is more magical than poetry? So instead of producing a series of chapbooks we’ve opted to create something a bit more special. Our first poet is Fíona Bolger and her Grimoire is called ‘The Geometry of Love between the Elements’ |
 Doris Lessing died a matter of days after I had received permission to carry some of the poems from her Fourteen Poems on this site indefinitely. I had put up the following note and message and see no reason to remove it. I am happy that I have carried her work for a few years. I wrote a brief tribute to Lessing’s writing and her influence on my writing life here.
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| Dear Christine
We’d be delighted for you to host the poems for longer especially if you’re getting such good reactions. Doris Lessing was never very keen on her poetry and didn’t think it was any good so I doubt we will see a re-issue but at least this way, they are available in an alternative form. |
Fragments from Noticingi The wick, uprooted/ left of light – ice-shawl thawing to the leaf-ends dissolves to the rain/ the rain’s bloom. ii Wet-edge/wet-air lifts the birds dampening to the rim of cloud quietly. iii Not-evening/ a dimming seam behind the treeline/rising a black whir of crows. iv Opposite/ unfastened flowers mantling the stone/summer’s tumbled frock. v Mirror-firth/silver with sky, with gulls’ backs. vi A dug-in place/a shadow. A black edge/a knuckle/a grave. Fragments from Noticing is © Gillian Prew . Edge/Untitled
Waiting among ghosts on the bursting stone/
white of memory/the wild weeds moved-in.
White of the rushing sea/ the gull backs/the moon.
Waiting/as if
a blue-lit eye/a voice of glass/a leaf-sway –
rain.
As if the rain a slow-motion dust.
The past –
a field/a room.
Wearing the grasses/the books
letting go/not letting go.
These pieces corrupted by time.
Small-sound stories half-writ.
The past whittled to white/and
it is ready a cut-through bone.
Edge/Untitled is © Gillian Prew |
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The weft of Margaret Atwood‘s The Penelopiad is contained in and revealed through the chorus voiced by the twelve maids hung by Telemachus (on Odysseus’ orders) just after the men returned from their manly adventures. Margaret Atwood runs the chorus line throughout her Penelopiad, the executed maids sing their songs at ten intervals in the book. I was struck by a comment that Atwood makes in her notes about the maids. She stated that:
‘The Chorus of Maids is a tribute to such uses of choruses in Greek Drama. The convention of burlesquing the main action was present in the satyr plays before the main drama.’ (Margaret Atwood, Author Notes for The Penelopiad pp. 197-198)
I am always interested in how women writers burlesque the heroic perception of the classics through use of device and structural underpinning. In this instance I have been reading Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Alice Oswald‘s Memorial. Both Atwood and Oswald approach Homeric themes in a sidelong fashion to get to the meat of the oral tradition, their poetic focus is decidedly on the lament. Atwood gives voice to the subversive and unquiet maids of The Odyssey. Oswald creates a dirge through interweaving the names of fallen warriors of The Iliad. Both Atwood and Oswald use the lament as the kernel for their thematic variations from and approaches to Homeric mythos. The poets use repetition to add texture to their laments thereby shaping and focusing the small forgotten voice toward expressing a universal grief. This is a not heroic poetry, it is a poetry of keening and loss.
Oswald’s Memorial has drawn quite divided critique. I mention in particular Jason Guriel‘s reductionistic approach to the book in which he refers to it as ‘a rose-fingered yawn’. This slighting throwaway remark does little to evoke interest in how women poets actually write, nor does it sufficiently disguise Guriel’s critical ennui. I would point the general poetic-reader to Michael Lista’s critique of Memorial in order to garner a more balanced view of the work.
Atwood’s twelve maids defiantly do not not burlesque the main action of The Penelopiad. They are the main action of the book. Penelope reveals herself to be a tedious bore whose lack of wit and guile are vaguely repellent. I wanted Atwood to get her toe out of the water and focus on the maids who enliven the text with their songs and shanties. The central pivot of The Penelopiad revolves round the nasty relation between Penelope and Helen rather than on the texturing of the maids burlesquing. In this, Atwood’s approach to Homer is a bit of a missed opportunity. The strength of the book is in its sub-theme which Atwood had not developed into a fuller rendering.
Oswald did not make a similar mistake in her approach to Homer’s The Iliad. She has broken down the book and re-made it a powerful dirge. The fact that this has led to an inability by her critics to get to what she is doing only strengthens the work in my view. The index for Memorial comprises an unnumbered litany of names from The Iliad. Oswald weaves their names into the text whilst interspersing their histories with individual laments for the warrior-groupings. These laments vary in length, they are devices to allow the mourning voice through. They are not separate to the main action of the book but are organically interleaved into and caught up in the theme and direction of this epic poem-dirge.
| ‘Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth And watered it and that wand became a wave It became a whip a spine a crown it became a wind-dictionary It could speak in tongues It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers And then a storm came spinning by And it became a broken tree uprooted It became a wood pile in a lonely field.Like a man put a wand of olive in the earth And watered it and that wand became a wave It became a whip a spine a crown it became a wind-dictionary It could speak in tongues It became a wobbling wagon-load of flowers And then a storm came spinning by And it became a broken tree uprooted It became a wood pile in a lonely field.’Page 31, Memorial, by Alice Oswald |
It interests me that contemporary women poets are approaching Homer through the use of the lament. They are voicing the silent mourning that occurs when the glory of battle is over. Atwood is giving voice to the abused girls whose life experiences are of enslavement and of misuse. Oswald does not state that the mourning voice in Memorial is that of a woman, but the cadence of the mourning poems that intersperse her text suggests the chorus, the lament.
In terms of contrast in poetic approaches to direct engagement with classical literature, one could point to how Ted Hughes re-told the twenty-four Tales From Ovid (Metamorphosis) or look at Heaney’s Beowulf. The fact that critique ignores the poetic engagement of women with the classics of literature only points to critical-disengagement, or at best to a narrow conservatism. It is time that The Chorus (that most pertinent part of Epic) is re-read, and given its place in the overall texturing of great poetic works. What would T.S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral be without the integrity of the women’s voices?
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| ‘…he took a cable which had seen service on a blue-bowed ship, made one end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round-house, high-up, so that their feet would not touch the ground. As when the long-winged thrushes or doves get tangled in a snare…so the women’s heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long.’ The Odyssey, Book 22 (470473) |
Transverse threads, women poets and Homer by C. Murray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
| press-to drop-by-drop raindrop-and-sinew the whole woman not tamp-in onto the still-living-soil a new shape embed-in the bone and the living-sinew-of the still-warm blood slowly-so and infinitely blue the milk-flow from crystallising breast a stone-dress .material as silk-soft caul or veil can be sweet as silk or rain or blue rain sinews against and into chalice of womb. half-into the wall and often not still a lone bird night-sings Fossil 1 is © C. Murray First published, A New Ulster issue VI , 2013 |
Of strangeness that Wakes us by Ilya Kaminsky
Published Poetry Magazine, January 2013. A Publication of the Poetry Foundation
Todesfuge, by Paul Celan is a poem that I have mentioned here on Poethead in a variety of guises since I first read the poet Paul Celan in Fathomsuns’ and ‘Benighted’ (Carcanet, Trans. by Ian fairley)
Later, I went on to acquire the book, Paul Celan Poet, Survivor, Jew by John Felstiner which has a chapter entitled, ‘A Fugue After Auschwitz (1944-45 ) /your ashen hair Shulamith’, detailing Felstiner’s approach to the translation of Todesfuge. I blogged my reading of Todesfuge here .
In many ways I do not feel as if I will ever finish with the reading of that poem. I feel that this blog space is too limited to write about Paul Celan and his dedicated translators including, Ian Fairley, Pierre Joris, and John Felstiner. However, when an interesting article or translation of Celan emerges I link to it here. Poetry Magazine (January 2013) has an article on Celan’s poetry, including some discussion of Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge. The text of the Felstiner translation of Todesfuge is included in Of strangeness that Wakes us by by Ilya Kaminsky.
Here Kaminsky discusses Celan’s alleged hermeticism , which the poet himself denied. He looks at the issues of expressing the experience of the Jewish poet Post-Holocaust and at Adorno’s exhortation that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after the Holocaust’.
Poetry had to be written after the Holocaust, as art had to occur. Weil or Tuominen would describe poetry written in cataclysmic times as a poetry of necessity.
The expression of the WWII diaspora poet in the great Todesfuge becomes, in Felstiner’s words an encapsulation of or/ the Guernica of Post-War European Literature. Those readers of Celan who come to Poethead to link to Celan’s works will be intrigued by Kaminsky’s discussion on Celan’s poetic-process, his approach to language, to the creative-process, and to his expressing of human catastrophe
On Felstiner’s translation of Todesfuge Kaminsky says,
‘In my private library, this is one of the great translations of the twentieth century. But the word “translation” to my mind is misleading. This translation (or any great translation, for that matter) is not a mirror. While one appreciates Felstiner’s haunting use of German words interspersed with English, this striking and powerful juxtaposition of languages doesn’t happen in Celan’s poem.’ (Of strangeness That Wakes Us )
The sheer brokenness of the mother-tongue in Celan’s expression is precisely what allows for linguistic multi-layering within a translator-approach to the poet’s work. It is precisely this that Felstiner divines and uses in his translation, and whilst it may not appeal to the purist, it is that seamless juxtaposition and use of the German that gives the Felstiner translation its evocative quality.
Get Poetry Magazine and read the entire Felstiner translation which is embedded into his wonderful article on Paul Celan.
Note: I linked a Pierre Joris essay on Paul Celan here in August 2010, regarding Todtnauberg , as well as numerous references to Celan’s work. Essays on Celan and his translators are too all-encompassing to limit to (or add to) existent blog-posts. I recommend that readers with an interest in Celan visit Poetry Foundation, Pierre Joris’ Nomadics blog, and Jacket 2 for further discussion on the work of Paul Celan.
YouTube of Todesfuge.
Chris Murray 