Post by shayepoet on May 24, 2008 22:04:31 GMT 2
But a Passage in Wilderness:
Margo Berdeshevsky[/b]
This is a first book of poetry by a recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, selected by Marie Ponsot.
The book forms a passage through the metaphorical wilderness of my time — in five sections: On Frailty/ Whom Beggars Call/ The Story/ On Breaking/ Best Love.
Sample poem:
Whom Beggars Call
…and a heart that understands cuts like rust in the bones.
[St. Augustine]
The two at the church door say “Ma fille,” they know I need,
they French-style kiss my
“bises,”
from beggars,
kiss me, twice.
The man who cannot love me whom I
chews his say I cannot correct, or love.
Like blue foxes, or birds,
graciously, the holy night
folds.
Or
Christmas stalks toward slouching Bethlehem again, the markets are ripe with foie gras,
and people will eat well while my beggarbrave days,
Oh obviously I see the concentrated man beside the church wall, so near if he was animal,
he'd bite. He’s drowning in plastic, and bottles, and bread, and blood. He’s carefully
daubing at his forearms with white paper, seining scabs in the thin noon, this rain is
straight-pins, he’s a serious kid inspecting his skinned knees in it, his arms bleed so near
if he was animal–
I pull my black woolen glove, I'll empty all my pockets to his un-expectant hand, no not
touching it. I watch my coins, how they slip his loose claw. It’s because of how I have
purposely eluded making a skin contact, it’s because his lips, his water-eyes, I know how
to drown, and I look in his glare, the red-rimmed lakes so near the River Seine, and my
voice says “Go get something for the arms, your arms, yes?”
“Oui petite Madame, oui, c’est clair,” in his sidewalk lair he looks in me all blear and
limpid at the same, how is it possible, to correct? One hand shoots out at me to shake my
hand–a gentleman. The heartbeat drowns me. Can I not touch the leper? Or, I take his
skin to skin, cold off-key sweetness in it, hands like aftertastes of bitter almond, rinds, oh
open walnuts. In the rain, my glove, my black woolen house is too bright already.
In a blizzard dawn in another house, a red haired son rolls to his mother’s stretch-marked
belly, speaks in sleep, “You’re all the light I'll ever need.” On my worried stairs, I'm the
glass one, sadder one, older one whom beggars still call “little lady,” and want to touch.
*
I am not wise.
I hide in churches.
The healer looks at me, and says I'm an exploded windshield, fissures sprayed across
the feet of chance. She says the break unveils the fragile underbelly and that’s good.
A strength.
Fragile. Strength. Fragile. Strength or mumbling like a beggar’s mantra, cross the Pont
des Arts.
I let him go like death, uncorrected.
Or graciously, the holy night folds my heart and other pages I have tried to memorize,
slowly as a blindness in its infant light.
Or
Christmas stalks toward slouching Bethlehem again, the markets ripe with
and the man
chews his own bones, blue fox in its winter snare. He bites his rosewood
pipe, or cannot love. Let’s say I try to heal him. Let’s say I try to heal him and I cannot,
or, he needs to be corrected. Or, tended by mendicants, bells,
the terrible starved angels speak.
I stain it on the mirror’s palette: change! I scrawl it 'cross the marble, manic as that man
of bones, or make it in a burned sienna lipstick-blood, beginning of a murderer’s tale or
scant salvation. Change. And Christmas stalks the hearts.
At the round dark vault that houses Mary Mother of
I light my mama’s candle,
“here, dead bird,”
and mutter until I think I begin to fathom it: our mothers. our births. our begging.
If there were ways to get to sides of lakes of no circumference.
Or two beside the church-door pray,
“On fait la bise, ma fille?”
They want to kiss me for my coin. “Que le bon Dieu t’aide, ce soir,
ma fille. On fait la bise?” as though I may not say but Yes, and kiss me.
The man
chews his own bones like tough birds, like the fox, bites his pipe, or cannot
love. Let’s say I try to heal him.
Say dragonfly, spine, convulsing. Say sad or manic or belly flayed toward what invented
him, or God why are my wings in your teeth? Say I pray, I correct, I pray. I pray for this
whole cold season, stair after stair, oh obsessed as a roof-rat, her nest of dark red sleeps,
the tangle of her un-brushed hair.
*
Well I'm an actress who knows only a few of her lines.
As close to Advent as to her cave, unable to dream; or There is
a dream, I'm playing the mad Ophelia again. I'm humming snatches, broken-boned. There’s
paper in my mouth, I'm eating a postcard from my lost love, chewing it, oh
absentmindedly the words I have not read may get inside me this way may leave
their inks on my mouth, stains–“Oh where is the beauteous majesty of–” line-
plunged birdlings, of the rain.
I am haunted by the grim
man I am trying to heal.
Your tall and educated walls–Break them. Your fortune, lose it. Your everything, too big
for you. Your all that is the wound, unhealed. I send you pieces of God with my shaking
hands. Chew them, along with your bones. In dream I'll meet your demons, twice their
size. How my hands are but salt, are raw with the daily sea. How I am haunted by giving
up. By your elegant fire pit, gone gray. Or Christmas stalks toward slouching Bethlehem
again, the markets, ripe with foie gras, and the people will–
Oh obviously I see the other, so near if he was animal, he'd bite. He’s drowning in–He’s
carefully daubing at–inspecting knees in it, his arms bleed so if he was animal–he’d
chew them off, or caught.
I pull my woolen empty, all my no–not touching it. It’s because of how I have
purposely, because of his lips, his water-eyes, I know how to drown. “Your arms, yes?”
or Christmas stalks whom beggars call–
“Oui petite Madame, oui, c’est clair.
“Que le bon Dieu t’aide ce soir, ma fille,”
in his sidewalk blear
how is it possible,
to correct?
“I heal you with correction. You need to be corrected.” Alice said so. I heard her.
One hand shoots out at me to shake my hand–a gentleman. The heartbeat drowns me,
skin to skin, cold off-key sweetness in it, hands like aftertastes of bitter almond, rinds, oh
open walnuts. Change, I scrawled across my mirror, before I left my dark house. Change,
for a merry Christmas. In the rain, my glove, my black woolen house is too bright already.
In a blizzard dawn in another house, a red haired son rolls to his mother’s stretch-marked
belly, speaks in sleep, “You’re all the light I'll ever need.” On my worried stairs, I'm the
glass one, see-through one, or older one whom beggars still call “little lady,” and want to
touch.
[“I heal you with correction, you need to be corrected.”
-- Alice Notley]
Reviews for But a Passage in Wilderness:
"...the most arresting poem in the collection, "Best Love and Goodbye," written in March 2003, it is like an ear pressed to the endless sky listening for the harbinger of the war that has lasted nearly five years."There is no war yet./Soon." The impending war makes the lines chillingly rhetorical..Throughout the global community alive in this book, men and women grieve for the loss of life, through the vulgarity of genocide as equally through growing old. In New York City, a soldier writes "love heals" on a sidewalk in chalk.Just as we read this, it begins to rain. It is vital, Berdeshevsky is saying throughout this book, that we are quick to notice such moments before they are erased, It is vital that we notice the rain (the eraser) and that the ultimate eraser is time. In this regard, Berdeshevsky reminds us of Carolyn Forché and the poetry she has written and embraced, most notably in her anthology of socially conscious poetry, "Against Forgetting (1993.) ...This is a passage through sorrow, and despite her many calls to others, Berdeshevsky walks through it alone. She must leave candles behind like breadcrumbs to find her way back by their light that burns like "heartbeats." She crosses the wilderness both lost and perfectly aware. She describes ponies that "know the course, but cannot stretch their white downed spines/ to gallop, can't span the fathoms with kicked light." This is the image that best encapsulates Berdeshevsky as a poet. She is the strong light and guiding force that shines upon the unknown for us. She is also the beggar who pleads for us to do the same for her, when she is most lost and alone. She is the proud mystic who can cast spells to erase our suffering. But she is also the broken wife who is beaten and scared, who can do nothing but hold her sign: "For sale: love, hardly used." ...
-- Review Excerpt: Dimitrios Kalantzis, The American Book Review: Volume 29, Number 5 americanbookreview.org/currentIssue.asp
"There is in Margo Berdeshevsky’s work a rare persistence of the lyric voice, used with a sense of ecstasy & grief almost religious in its evocations. Absolutely modern & fearlessly romantic by turns, the poems circle the rich & threatened corners of the living planet & travel further into places marked by mythic & oneiric time. With the publication of But a Passage in Wilderness, Berdeshevsky emerges, fully empowered, as the maker of a new poetry that pushes voice & image toward creation of a world “barbaric, vast and wild” that Diderot once saw as marker of what all poetry must be."
-- Jerome Rothenberg
"... at once quintessential poems of witness and poems with the eternal quality of the tale or fable: a truth co-existent with the truth of observation, intrinsic to the words and the perceptive, humane imagination that engendered them. Margo Berdeshevsky’s poems, wherever they situate themselves have emotional power, beauty and immediacy, found in the here-and-now, woven with extraordinary awareness of what is precisely not beautiful in human life, which is an intrinsic part of the poems’ texture and reason for being."
-- Marilyn Hacker
"What makes But a Passage in Wilderness a unity, a big book and a small cosmos, is the depth of feeling it conveys, abundant and interactive, embodied and sensual. The poems are unfailingly fluent with emotional understanding, accurately invoked. A faithful dailyness radiates her words, even in her most daring flights. “Mother-ground,” she says, “show me roots in your bare dirty kiss.” She has taken her store of our language to heart."
-- Marie Ponsot
*****
On-line reviews for But a Passage in Wilderness:
Larissa Shmailo, nycBigCityLit.com
tinyurl.com/6dlxm6
Karren LaLonde Alenier, The Dressing
tinyurl.com/6gzv85
Larissa Shmailo, nycBigCityLit.com
tinyurl.com/6dlxm6
Karren LaLonde Alenier, The Dressing
tinyurl.com/6gzv85
*****
About the author:
Margo Berdeshevsky currently lives in Paris. Her poetry collection, But a Passage in Wilderness, was published by The Sheep Meadow Press in 2007. Her honors include the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize for Beautiful Soon Enough, to be released in 2009. the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Chelsea Poetry Award, Kalliope’s Sue Saniel Elkind, places in the Pablo Neruda and Ann Stanford Awards. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, Poetry Daily, New Letters, Poetry International, Margie, Pool, Siècle 21, Europe, Poetry Review (UK,) Nimrod, Rattapallax, ACM, Women's Studies Quarterly, and more. Her "Tsunami Notebook" of poems and photographs was made during and following a journey to Sumatra in Spring 2005—to work in a survivors' clinic in Aceh. A lifelong traveler, her novel Vagrant, is at the next gate, to be published by Red Hen Press. Often, she is on the road—probably for her newest book.
ISBN: 1-931357-50-1, Paper
The Sheep Meadow Press, 2007; 109 pages; $12.95
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