A poet with extraordinary power for metaphor

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came over to the United States as a Fulbright and Wien International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many critical volumes, including Reading the Literatures of Asian America; Approaches to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Transnational Asia Pacific; and Power, Race and Gender in Academe; and three special issues of journals, Ariel (2001) on microstates, Tulsa Studies, on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, on contemporary Asian American literature.

Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her recent honors, Lim has received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002) and the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2000), as well as the University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and t J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lim is also recognized as a creative writer. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999, and again on the program “Now” in February 2002.

She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press, 2001), has been welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” She edited/co-edited Asian American Literature; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing; and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology which received the 1990 American Book Award.


Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came over to the United States as a Fulbright and Wien International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many critical volumes, including Reading the Literatures of Asian America; Approaches to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Transnational Asia Pacific; and Power, Race and Gender in Academe; and three special issues of journals, Ariel (2001) on microstates, Tulsa Studies, on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, on contemporary Asian American literature.


Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her recent honors, Lim has received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002) and the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2000), as well as the University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and t J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lim is also recognized as a creative writer. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999, and again on the program “Now” in February 2002.

She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press, 2001), has been welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” She edited/co-edited Asian American Literature; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing; and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology which received the 1990 American Book Award.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has published five other volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), a retrospective selection of her work; What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998); and Listening to the Singer (2007), a collection of poems out of Malaysia. Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words.” She is also the author of three books of short stories; a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1997 American Book Award for non-fiction); two novels, Joss and Gold (2001) and Sister Swing (2006); and a children’s novel, Princess Shawl (2008). Her first novel was welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale [that] places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” Lim's co-edited anthology The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology received the 1990 American Book Award. She has published critical studies and edited/co-edited many volumes and special issues of journals, including recently Transnational Asia Pacific; Power, Race and Gender in Academe; Asian American Literature: An Anthology; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing, and special issues of Ariel, Tulsa Studies, Studies in the Literary Imagination, and Concentric. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. Among her honors, Lim received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002), the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and the J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Learning to Love America

because it has no pure products

because the Pacific Ocean sweeps along the coastline
because the water of the ocean is cold
and because land is better than ocean

because I say we rather than they

because I live in California
I have eaten fresh artichokes
and jacaranda bloom in April and May

because my senses have caught up with my body
my breath with the air it swallows
my hunger with my mouth

because I walk barefoot in my house

because I have nursed my son at my breast
because he is a strong American boy
because I have seen his eyes redden when he is asked who he is
because he answers I don’t know

because to have a son is to have a country
because my son will bury me here
because countries are in our blood and we bleed them

because it is late and too late to change my mind
because it is time.

Newcastle Beach

(For Kerrie Coles and Brian Joyce)

At 6 a.m. I set off for the Pacific,

her heaving bosom stretched between

rival lovers gazing from opposite beaches.

Silicate, shell and stone roil beneath her touch,

back and forth, groaning, while she slips

away and toward, teases sun rising

and setting, and the surfer men come daily.

I also adore her, threaded to her fine

eyebrow horizons, changeful swells that raise

my thirst no matter how much I swallow.

I can never be a woman like her,

forever wet, incipiently

violent even when calmed. In Newcastle

young boys and older throw their bodies

passionately at her each morning,

naked male skin carried toward dark rock

and cars. By sides of streets they strip,

wriggle into work clothes, as day

collapses into schools, offices, coal-mines

and their women's arms, awake and sullen

in the world of dry air. They are mermen,

stolen away from their mothers' hips.

And I? Drawn early down to Bogie Hole,

treading the slippery convict-shattered

stone steps, descend to the maddened

slamming of her spittle against tumbled

boulders, gulp the white and yellow sprays

that break, withdraw and break, in digital

seconds never returning. Like our men

moving on to other bodies, while the Ocean

Woman breathes in, breathes out, breathes in,

cradling her surfers past danger and drowning.

Bogie Hole

Before that old crone curse,

arthritis,comes down on me, I walk up Newcastle

Beach to Bogie Hole, where the governor

had a pool carved out of ancient basalt

by Irish convicts. Surf smashes on the rough

hewn blocks thrice every minute

it seems–and white foam sprays in ceaseless

upsurges of power. What power, I ask,

as I peer over the handrails, studying

sea-moss slime-slippery steps cut

into cliff face steep down to Bogie Hole,

studying as if a curious text

the heart skips over, falling in love

with falling, before backing off

from the savor of salt fatalism.

Not yet, my feet say, stepping away.

Today, for the first time I see

dolphins jumping above the surf line,

black fins racing over the Pacific

natural as my feet walking

in sunshine along Bathers' Way.

What has brought me to Newcastle

no one knows, least of all me.

Blue skies and Pacific air the same

as home, leaving home is mere

practice for leaving all, all

the leavings learned again and again,

until goodbye becomes

addictive, the last look

behind, the first look forward,

what you carry everywhere

and everyday. Temporary living

is what childhood taught me.

Packing up, sleeping on others'

mattresses, and always hungry

for the new morning, and night

to be endured, supperless,

sharp as a paring knife peeling

another brown spot.

Writing a poem

(At the Lock Up)

The air is buzzing. Someone near by

is operating a giant machine. He's scrubbing

a just sold building with a high

powered hose. None of us are listening,

although we are each hopeless before

this dizz-dizz-dizz. If it was a monstrous

radiated beetle, we couldn't be more

helpless. It's eating up the hours

as if they were the sweet nectar of day,

which they are. It is impossible

to think or write. Its buzz takes away

feelings, takes over ears, is drilling a hole

in a loose tooth as you sit in history's

dental chair, frantic and still, the drill

hammering gums until only

spit oozes, dribbles, spills over, fills

cavities you didn't know you had,

only the drill lives in your head,

only the sharp dull dizz-dizz-dizz.

This is how the poem ends, dizz-dizz. . . .

Dating
(At the Hunter Street Mall)
I went on another date with my writing today. We've been dating for a long time. I don't know why we keep meeting. It never ends in sex, although sometimes it's led to my reading a book in bed. Often he does not bother to appear. I wait and wait, throat burning in dread, my tight chest overflowing with aches and burrs of anxiety, until I cannot bear the humiliation, even if no one is there, no one's watching, and I don't care, I finally leave, abject and alone, for something else, a nut muffin, or worse, a plate of limp over-salted French fries. I never get really angry. I wish I would, and then maybe I'd say goodbye.

But when he does turn up, I'm fascinated by his blather, it can throw a surprise like an amateur hitting an underhanded blow. Yet I've heard most of his stories so many times I can end his lines for him. You could say I find him a bore, so I don't know why I keep listening.

He's capable of mumbling. Between duhs and ums he may say something I like, and I carry it back in my mouth, imagining it's a bit of worm a magpie crams into the hungry crop of its chick, and I take it out when I am alone, greedy, before I actually swallow it.

We've been dating like this since I was nine. I wouldn't call him a pedophile but he's not a big brother either. No, it's not a healthy relationship, although it isn't exactly sick. And, yes, he's created problems, particularly with girlfriends who get jealous because of his attentions. They don't see how long-suffering I've been. My husband doesn't care. He understands first love comes first. Besides, he's my last love, and they don't offer the same fruit, apples to bananas. I get fed up, today, feeling my age, and want to sit in the shade instead, eavesdropping on busy hummingbirds pillaging fuschias and lilies. They're attractive even if empty-headed. Still, every April, they lay their eggs, and at least one fledging sticks around till summer ends.

Shark Story

I've seen him hobble on one long strong leg,

the other a dangling stump, third a crutch,

in swimming shorts and tee, and sit by Nobby's Beach,

on the wood-slatted bench near the hot parking lot

and sucking surf tucked distant meters away.

He said this sandy stretch, the boast of Newcastle,

appears like acres of salt tears he hadn't shed

when they'd lifted him out of Shark Alley

winters ago, after the juvenile gray snagged

the limb from him, harder to cross with hobble

and crutch and one good leg than he'd first imagined.

Most afternoons between lunch and sunset crowds

he sits watching the black-suited amphibian

boys hurry with bee-waxed boards into the waves.

Yes, they do look like elegant seals in and outof ocean.

Ignore his gaze that says nothing

except wonder where among the particles

of the Pacific his flesh and blood now surge

with the spindrift and its tide, sensation

of thigh and calf and foot and toes clasping

like that bite threshing its fish head still

in the surf most afternoons on Nobby's Beach.

A high school teaching poet of A Clas

FARRAH FIELD

Farrah Field's poems have appeared in the Mississippi Review, Margie, Chelsea, The Massachusetts Review, Harpur Palate, and Pool, and are forthcoming in Sojourn and Another Chicago Magazine. Her first book of poems Rising won the 2007 Levis Poetry Prize from Four Way Books. She teaches high school in New York City.

Some of her poems

Intensities of Emphasis and Wonder

The sleeping one is erect and mumbles.
The room went Arctic overnight

and his foot peeks outside the covers.
You leave his warm slumber

five minutes before the new hour,
stomach growling, and possible

moon somewhere. There's slight moisture
still. He'll later say he saw you leave.

The day will happen soon enough—
peanut butter sandwich, dropped knife,

tote bag of graded papers.
Flossing in a colder room,

planning Jefferson myth-debunking,
washing hair—the man's sleep stretches

without boundaries, rolled to middle,
as if it were his bed, thick lashes,

even beard, and no concern for pillow.
He doesn't know it's October and you are happy.

Mother Talks to Herself Before Hunting Her Children

There's no need to investigate kindness. You were
never a there, there back patter. You melted their

coloring sticks to the carpet and they trailed radishes
that ended at a pile of fortified bobcat poop.

They knew you were a witch before you told them.
For the first born, you wished her never to suffer illness.

Then you wanted all of them sick with fever so you could
wipe their sweaty arms below the blankets. The oldest

cared for them and you watched her from your mind,
wringing a cloth in cold water, resting to knit more cloths,

humming tunes you never taught her. You laughed
when you saw their little panties hung on the laundry line,

wind bobbing elastic legs-holes like a xylophone.
Everyone who thinks babies solve loneliness is wrong.

You washed your face with menstrual blood
until they caught you. Once they ran away, you realized

they were what you wanted all along. You had perfect people,
but you were biting the heads off, well, it doesn't matter.

Your daughters never needed you even when you forced them

The Future, Low and Weary

She was killing a piece for quite some time, nicknamed
it the L.A. part, cigarette and Camero, going out to the desert.
You step further into the hallway, jet-lagged, dragging her body.
Others' houses are thrilling, their reek of air and presence. Once
you hid in the doorway, startled Mother when she passed.
Once you went to Keats' house, where he was bled and liked
to sit in two chairs. The gone don't know they're gone,
know what they meant to a pillow. Even this one
with the unfinished tattoo on her ankle, vinyl dress on the floor.
Not feeling is an organized process of pools, Demerol, freeways—
a living fiction. Why has the death mask lost its tradition ?

Preservation is a picky thing; how effective is a face really,
save the expression of the Queen. You're friend, she's a goner.
You hoist her onto her bed and she will lie, saying nothing was ever
snorted. She'll need out as soon as she wakes—the dishes
with stuck cheese, coffee, chances at a straight flush, crumpled
twenty-dollar bills, the abortion. Everything is too heavy to handle,
even a body, those miserable days in school, the boots still in their box.

Never Leave a Rhinstone Unturned

The fancy singer chirps at her own boob jokes,
then sits in a white chair to sing about
Smoky Mountain life while she picks

a diamond-studded auto harp in her sparkly lap.
She's always been like that,
beginning poor and happy

then wigged and marveled,
a bride of future earrings
or ungraspable Tennessee grit

stuck beneath her plastic finger extensions,
and talk of trucks like lovers gone away.
A show or isn't she—

unnecessary background singers,
purple curtains, rhinestone banjo,
the beauty-singer business quality

of this atlas of music and self-promotion,
lip-glossed storyteller, pretty songs,
and possible theme park braggart.

What hurts most here—
my sister wore a wig and stuffed chest
in Mama's cream-colored church dress,

and pretended to be the one-woman triumvirate:
glee, mascara, voice for fringes,
puffy sleeves, wireless microphone, and farmland

How to Break Into a Storage Facility

There were no secret instructions among their things.
It was as though their mother’s house collected
empty hairbrushes and white booted roller skates.
There were no girls to match the reading stools
and uneaten noodles. Nothing had fingerprints,
not even the duck eggs the mother threw
from the girls’ window. I guess they won’t need these,
she said. She didn’t refer to the girls by name.

The detective never worked the weirder cases—
kids being raised by wolves or kept hidden.
None of the neighbors knew there were children.
No one saw them go to school. Their mother refused
an APB. Troubles in the orange house were routine.
There were four piles of ashes found beneath the girls’ beds—
their pets. All this time, the detective assumed

children wanted to go home. Parents prepared
sleds or favorite meals. I don’t think you want to go down
there, the mother said when he approached the cellar.
Generally, mothers’ distraught nature enveloped him
and allowed him use of everything in order to bring
their children back. Millicent admitted four unreported,
missing girls. After the detective’s visit,

the gardener’s tongue was removed. Regardless,
information was slipped to him: call the teacher.
At home, he wrote the county for birth certificates,
before feeding his cat and dog. What would you do
if you found the girls. There are thousands of homeschool
teachers. He tried to hang his coat in the refrigerator.
Something in the new is world. From a branch
on the old willow, eight eyes were intent upon the glass.

The Girls Gather Around While He Sleeps

You’re not as smart as you’d like to be, but you’re smarter than you think.
The day has been long and you’ve accomplished less.
The crab-mauling scar on your foot hangs over the bed.
We picture you growing up on a shore.
Once a group moves from its habitat,
another group is changed.
We pushed the Bighorns further out
and we didn’t mean to do that.
We felt lucky to see them.
Living near people is like living inside.
You smell like our teacher.
She wrapped strawberry preserves and Brazilian nuts
in brown paper. You left them in your locked car.
The note that we wrote hangs above the nearby desk.
Helen Gale. We call her Helena. 3691 Coffee Avenue.
You think you might be on to something.
Your arms are crossed as though you fell asleep thinking.
We wonder if you’ll sleep so soundly next to her,
if she’ll make pumpkin pancakes.
It’s easy to know when someone’s in your house:
listen for a tack being pulled from the wall and paper falling.
When you look for people smarter than you, you look for them.
There are four of us and when we move, eight steps are taken.
We can go no further than your pastures
because we arrived without a trace and no one can do that again
unless by vanishing. A mountain lion hunts your land,
but she doesn’t frighten us.
They say no one chooses their own mother,
but they’re wrong. We weren’t born like other people.
Helena will brew tea for you later. Something has to happen.



The Smartest Person in a Room Never Speaks

We don’t know how the sisters crawled out of the window,
the detective said, counting footsteps from the rocking chair
to the window, then from the desk to the window as if the girls,
scattered around the room, one by one got up and left.

The carpet looks as though it’s only been crept upon.
There are no impediments, even under the platform rocker.
Chairs and other furniture sit very wide apart. If a table held
cold drinks, they couldn’t be reached from any chairs.

Lincoln and his son hang above the fireplace hardware.
The girls call him “fourth boy”. They thought they would
catch Tuberculosis from the portrait. There were Revolutionary
soldiers in the family. The girls wanted to register their names.

Child-size chairs made the detective feel tall in an old way.
He stood in the bay near the Gothic Revival windows.
The four sisters were like deer taking a blooming rose
without any sign they had been there or would return.

The girls hung wooden boxes they made. Their teacher
let them work together, creating one piece at a time,
working without talking. Planning how all sisters plan.
They reupholstered a parlor chair with dark green denim.

No one knows how big houses came to exist, how anyone
could walk in on a daily basis, mount a war-period wall clock,
pollute the cold kitchen with pork dumplings, heat the toilet lid.
The detective wondered if the girls knew how to ride bicycles.

Four wool coats were gone. There was no need to console
the cross-armed mother, who made the detective nervous,
even after she suddenly went down to the kitchen, peered over
the Dutch door and sure enough, a porcelain leg.



We Left Before My Turn

We placed the leg outside the door and the rest
twenty miles in the wrong direction. Old doll,
false lead. Running away is easy

when you hardly talk to your mother.
She ate snails once. But did you see her chew them?
I’ve never seen her chew anything.

We didn’t speak until a week underground.
No one was stitchy. We measured time
by plastic cereal bowls. Our mother appeared

in the garden once. She ran a long nail
up my spine. You should keep a back like that
covered, she said. I’m the littlest. I asked her

what she was doing there. She had powder
on her face; I could see it in the hairs.
She said she’d been up for eight days.

I didn’t look in her eyes as she walked
circles around me. She said I’d never guess
what she was going to do with the turtle

wiggling in her hands, gasping for breath.
It was beyond shrinking into its shell, flaying
the air as though it could swim home.

That is the only time I ate dinner with her.
My orange suitcase smells like my duck.
Our mother probably smashed the eggs

by now. I wonder why she never arranged
baby-sitters for us. Because you had me, Matilda says.
She’s returned from the surface. It’s May.

A criticism on her book

Census mumbo-jumbo tells Americans that the average (more privileged) human being changes career types an average of seven times. To transliterate that statement: the average American with the normal amount of spoonfed opportunity gets all sorts of various jobs to pay the light bill – and thinks they are solely one thing – but they are at least seven things in the helix of a lifespan. Poets are different, however. Because in the U.S., to be a poet is a fringe identity; it’s not a forklift driver, not an ad-exec either. And within that, there are types of poets: NeoFormalists, narrative poets, language poets, swiss cheese poets, flarfers, etc.

Farrah Field claimed, when I recently interviewed her, “Like Anna Akhmatova, I thought I was one kind of poet, but realized I was another. Two things were at stake for me--writing about Heather and making my poems do something they hadn't yet done.”

Heather is her sister and a recurring sort of device or protagonist in the book, also the victim of a brutal murder (in reality and the book). This is a key thing to stay aware of as Heather pops in and out like the kernel of a phantom haunting both poet and reader. A grandmother dies; phones explode; orgasms elude, deteriorate, and detonate.

Rising was unmistakably chosen by Tony Hoagland as the 2007 Levis Prize winner. The book feels like a fist plummeting backwards through at least six (if not eight) feet of mud. The poems come up from behind, whispering and seducing; but as soon as you turn around and arrive at the departing end of a piece, you get punched in the lip. Here is one of those Tyson-fisted endings, from one of the best poems of the year so far, “Weird Luck:”

Once you will be lost in prayer
and will be found craving muffins.

Hope exists. It’s the taste of boy in your mouth.

[. . . ]

A child will die in your arms
and whiskey will disappear from your glass.

Your sister is a ghost with a broken skull.

You are allowed one good memory
in a pumpkin patch.

It’s an apotheosis of the surreal and the narrative, juggling skeletons inside the various closets of memories. Rising also requires the reader to laugh at the grotesque, the perverted, the grave and morbid. Field told me that she has an “unpuritanical attitude when it comes to writing about violence and sex; and I have a pretty sick sense of humor to boot.” At least she is self-aware.

Pieces like “The Telling” and “Your Lordship Spirals,” as well as “Malvern, Arkansas” all prove this grit buried deep in a gray heart. Even more sordidly unfeigned are these gems from “He’ll Have Surgery on His Brain in the Future”: “He looks like a nice boy and acts like a smart person.” She also stakes, “my eyes are big for wrong reasons . . . At home, I mix bleach to clean up maggots.”

A majority of the book is place-based. If an event or a memory is not explicated in Louisiana, Arkansas, Wyoming or Belgium (all places the Air-Force brats grew up) then it is in a backyard, on a porch or in a trailer.

This tends to zip a reader into a centrifugal chaos but can also wrap a comfortable quilt around the reader’s sensibility. Overt sentimentality takes on its usual, angular, undervaluing shape in many poems as well. One of the best/worst poems in the book (worst, due to its sentimental hooks and best, for its politics) is “Hard Times in Animas Forks.” The awfully upright goes: “across my feet. At a mine shaft entrance,/I hear the voices of men who have worked/in the earth: we can’t withstand the soot,/the shitty wages, the constant collapse.”

Her endings are so fierce that it makes the poems’ beginnings and middles feel disjointed and contused. Basically, some feel like the endings were written first. There is also a second person drone in many of the poems that creates a mechanical ambience. And the role of the South is strong; without its grandiosity, Field begins to approach something like a Nietzsche without a Germany.In our interview, Field compared herself to Ahkmatova getting at the point that an artist posits the idea of one crescendo but hears others. I’d rather hear a Field crescendo any day of the week than one from Ahkmatova.

Joys and cares in great and small of the day

.

Maya Sarishvili

(Born in Georgia, 1968)

There are two things that the Georgian poet Maia Sarisjvili (1968) clearly cannot get enough of: children and poems.She has studied pedagogy, is the mother of four children and teaches at primary school. Being this busy does not prevent her from writing poetry. Even so, there is a great difference between her way of dealing with her large family and professional life and her life as a poet.

She is brimful of energy and creativity when it comes to making life attractive for her children at home and those at school. Her inner poet, however, has to fall into line: in stolen small hours in the middle of the night, the joys and cares great and small of the day just past find poetic expression. Her poetry reads like a catalogue of the madness of everyday life and the contrasting sense of rest that emanates from children.

Sarisjvili deals with everyday subjects by referring to concrete objects and actions. Her poetry displays a realistic and materialistic touch that she refashions in her spiritual search for the nature and power of woman. Her work is suffused with images that, because of their directness, corporality and psychological force, have introduced a new sound into Georgian poetry. Maia Sarisjvili writes short, evocative poems that contain everything in one breath.

I constantly surprise Georgians when I talk to them about their female poets. Many of them are scarcely known, they are published in driblets and are not to be found on the wanted lists of TV producers and organisers of literary gatherings. Female poetry in the landscape of Georgian poetry has all the characteristics of a diary: it consists of tough statements of what it is like to live as a woman, wife, mother and daughter. The existentialist tone is perhaps reminiscent of the work of Sylvia Plath, who is a considerable model for many female Georgian poets.

Ingrid Degraeve (Translated by John Irons)

Some of her poems

Again the honey has gone bad,

Again the honey has gone bad,
Taken into the house on the hem of a dress.
There’s a hint of grey and a taste of chintz
And something sizzles magically inside: what?
I stick my wide-open eyes in,
But still can’t see anything.
My rejoicing turns out to be nothing,
Adorning the days with banners of peals of laughter.
Only an unknowing sadness rises from me like smoke –
Stinking, choking,
And I can’t say in anyone’s presence
How my piteous sleep
Is lashed by razor-sharp shrieks,
Because every night
I wave myself about like a hatchet,
So that I can cut off as fast as possible
One more,
And again for something’s sake,
Day that’s been endured.

CIRCLE AND RECTANGLE

As a child I existed in just these two shapes:
Outside – the round yard of the children’s playground,
Inside – the high-windowed loggia’s rectangle.
Anything else was like a pitch-dark tunnel . . .
When I entered the loggia
A thousand drawers would open all at once:
Drawers with medicine, linen, jewellery, sealed papers,
And mischievous smells would waft out of them.
But in the morning, in the playground’s roundness
A whirlpool of evergreen bushes foamed
And down the child’s slide, with shrieks of joy,
Mingling with the children, angels rushed.

How will things be for me this winter?

How will things be for me this winter?
Let’s say, may I get rich,
But I shan’t order any snow in big flakes,
I’ll stock up on unproblematic carefree days,
From the room I shall hound out insolent moles
And I shall diligently fill the cavities in the floor.
For proper things
I shan’t mess up the proper path.
A trusting hand
Will remove the dust with a piece of velvet.
I shan’t compare the sound of the clock
To barefoot children gadding about.
I shall never again compare anything to anything,
But woe if the bridge calls me at night!
(It’s afraid it can plunge right down.)
Its mighty irons crumble my fingers,
When its railings cling to me
And won’t let me go.

It won’t work out this way,

It won’t work out this way,
Even if you tip over a whole forest,
You won’t be able to find a single root anywhere.
The universe, when not fixed to the earth,
Is like a terrible dream.
Towns just lie about on the asphalt,
Seas are turned rigid
Wherever the earth topples over
And drift off afar –
Like colossal razors,
They slide uncontrollably.
And how eagerly all of us,
One by one,
Strip the old-fashioned veins from our bodies –
And very soon
Even the bees can’t sting any more
Our porcelain children, which are meant to be set out
On the grand pianos.

MATERNITY HOME

One’s fingers gravitate there endlessly,
Like rivers of milk.
A thousand times they have changed
My hospital linen,
Soiled with fatty whiteness –
Ten yells hurl
Towards the open door of the ward.
The corridor, trembling in ten bands of delirium,
Tells a fairytale about plastic trees,
Trees decorated with glass-eyed baubles.
Send to me in here
A single hair of my mother’s,
Or a teaspoonful of lilac flowers.
It’s bad here.
Here my children sit
In the carers’ pockets, stuck with navel cord.
And on handkerchiefs full of dried slime,
Their skin is scrubbed.
Why do they take bits of my flesh about in a pocket?
They can’t fit any more faces, swollen with spite,
Into the wards
And they carry the poisonous cheeks
Out of the windows into the streets.
There they amuse themselves
Looking at the endless movement of my fingers
And can’t understand
That I hold the whole world!

MICROSCOPE

Nobody has got so scared as I, for some reason,
Nobody can have caught sight of melancholy exuded by the cells.
The cells of onion skins,
Cells of strands of hairs of fail-grade and top-grade pupils,
The whole class of cellular beings,
Including the view from the window . . .
Suddenly the protective layer has been stripped from the universe,
The path to the house becomes alien.
And the house with all its rooms.
But further off
Dubious alien parents
At dubious work . . .
What melancholy. What spell-casting.
Silent film seen under the microscope.
It’s as though
God calls up something for your eyes
But still won’t tell you the main thing.

Tell my husband

Tell my husband
That this, my veil, grew from the skull,
Like fatty milk leaving crispy clefts.
The veil is chimney smoke.
And I am a dark chimney,
Or a hot veranda, onto which I raise up
These globules of milk fat – wasps –
In places from which there is no return, very high up . . .
Tell my husband, my mother’s soul is a veil
That has flown off anxiously into my hair and sways me –
But this pain
Still lingers in my flesh, like a diamond bullet.
Tell my husband
That I shall set sugar pigeon squabs as a veil on the back of my head,
Or I shall use his letters as a covering instead of a veil,
When I grow so old and changed,
Like a flower unfurling in boiling water.

The child’s roughly used clothes.

The child’s roughly used clothes.
Yes, that’s what let me recognize clarity.
I shall come here, I said,
And silently they dropped me off there.
The things took off their headscarf,
So that I could see how big the ears had grown. Words I had heard
Were watching from there
And I recognized the room, too . . .
Two opaque children
Came up to my bed.

The roots of the objects in the room have rotted,

The roots of the objects in the room have rotted,
And like a bud,
Healthy, tender –
The big table threw off a little table,
And the big chair threw off a little chair.
There are two bookcases,
A dying one and a new one –
With pinpoint-sized books and with tender glass.
But from the thick foot if the Goliath grand piano
Grew out a piano the size of a little finger.
How good!
With just limpid smiles I shall water the rooms
And I shall raise things my own way,
Like flowers.

There was one joy –

There was one joy –
I sat on his lap
And into my eyes
He spilled juice from the orange peel.
Then he forgot me,
When he lit a cigarette
But I still could not walk very well,
I came sliding off his lap
And pressed my cheek to his shoe.
How different is the sound under the table
Of guests’ voices,
Muffled sounds.
Muffled space.
Barely,
Barely had my eyelashes
Dried from the drenching of orange juice.
There was this one joy.

TO KHATIA

I get so tired,
With unimaginable speed
Things, news, my body rush towards me.
Your words can no longer reach me,
They shatter like the hours
In pursuit of me
And pathetically pile up in pieces.
I can no longer stop
To record in your eyes the ray of light’s explanation.
From afar I shoot swarms of dry dyes at you
And I speak to you in a tongue-tied language
Which is entrusted to other dark-coloured adults.
But when you get milk from me
I see calmly swaying
Under the skin of your temple
That silent and pale landscape of ours.

TO NATIA

The pink cream in the cookie
Is very embittered.
It shrieks non-stop at me
From the dark hell of the coffee-coloured biscuit,
And even dreams no longer have
The taste of the jam of the stars.
From the kitchen tap
Fall foxes.
They’ve chewed off my hands.
I sit on the floor and the pot shatters.
Now I keep my eyelids tight shut
So that my sight can quickly come to the boil, and
So that I can see sisters of various heights,
That, like hands of the clock, are fixed
To the dial, their mother.
Happiness is as stubborn as a stone bud
But I cannot worry any more
About those arms of mine –
They were always making hysterical scenes at me.
And like a pill under my tongue I placed a white button
That had broken off my youngest child’s shirt.
Then I felt:
My child’s heart is my walking frame,
When I sometimes forget how to walk,
When nothing can rise up,
And I wish:
Perhaps something may come along
Which will transfer the blood beyond these paths.