It is a truth universally acknowledged that poetic language differs somehow from the stuff we use in ordinary daily conversation. The latter derives from early hominid needs to communicate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”) or coordinate (“Orf, look out for that mastodon!”), or, according to more recent theories, from early hominid social grooming practices (hence so much of our current conversation as either empty -- “How ya doin’?” -- or nitpicking). The former bears a whiff of incense or altar fire or the irruption of the divine into the mundane. So much depends, of course, on how one or another poet or theorist glosses the “somehow” in my first sentence, but that’s the topic of another post.
For Romanian poet Liliana Ursu, the analogy between poetry and prayer is sometimes a theme and sometimes a practice. In the best poems gathered in Lightwall, a new collection translated by Sean Cotter and brought to you in a beautifully designed volume by the fine folks at Zephyr Press, Ursu unites theme and practice, essaying the ineffable by weaving webs of image, allusion, and figurative language.
Ritual language is most obviously thematized in poems that either are about or that invoke “spiritual athletes” – saints, ascetics, and contemplatives. The results are mixed. In “Concerto for Vasile the Monk,” Ursu narrates herself listening to Beethoven’s “Imperial Concerto” (I’ve typically seen the Piano Concerto Number Five in E Major, Opus 73, referred to as the “Emperor Concerto”) and, as she works, communing with the composer, telling him the story of the monk, Vasile, who saved a Coptic brother from the Ottomans by hiding him and carrying him to safety in a burlap bag. Beethoven announces a re-titling of this concerto, from “Imperial” to “Concerto for Vasile the Monk.” The poem links composer, poet, and Coptic monk in resistance to the authorities represented by empires and Ottomans. It is Beethoven’s presence, his assistance, as the poet prepares to write that positions him for this episode “from the lives of the monks," and Vasile claims that the monk he carried to safety was as light as the quill with which the brother wrote. Nothing in the poem’s own language, though, indicates where this kind of power might lie in the action of the pen. A mystical moment from the Lives of the Monks on the Holy Mountain of Athos feels more earned in “From the Lives of the Birds,” whose stanzas catalogue the conditions of possibility for different birds’ songs (clearly a figure for the song that is poetry itself):
Canaries only sing when caged.
The sky is far off,
an enigmatic safe.
But if you cage the tomtit
-- the anonymous
the ignored –
it wraps its claws around its throat
and chokes to death.
This attention to the birds rather than to the figure of the poet rhymes nicely with the anecdote that closes the poem: an elder apprenticed to a monastery but prevented by his humility from becoming a monk, covers himself with crumbs on snowy days and feeds the birds from his hands and shoulders and face, eliciting their songs with this offering of himself.
I wish more of the poems in Lightwall followed the model of the Elder of Elisa and subordinated the poet to the poem. I’m not a fan of poems about being a poet (it takes a lot to rise above that topic’s inherent limitations and produce a “Sleep and Poetry” or “Circus Animals’ Desertion” ) and there are here, especially in the section called “One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights in Lewisburg” (where Ursu was a visiting poet at Bucknell University), many such poems. The powers of ritual language just aren’t convincing in a poem about reading poems in a former church:
Here, in America, in another church, turned into a theater
I read poem after poem
as though I were building
a cross out of words
With great care
with unending motion
But with peace, too, in my soul
climbing humbly
the ladder of prayer
Until all the walls of the theater
fill with icons
and burning candles.
I’m not sure I can quite buy “humbly” in this scene of transformation, especially when the stanza I quote is juxtaposed to the story of Cosma, the monk, who built crosses in the wake of Ottoman destruction of churches in the Balkans. More crucially, though, is the absence in the poem’s own language of anything that hints at the transformative power the language narrates. There’s no music, no metaphoric magic, that enacts what the poem attempts to describe. (This might be a matter of translation; I don’t read Romanian and can’t say how much the original might sing in ways that don’t make it over the barrier into English.)
The better poems in this book, to my mind, are those whose claims for poetic power are implicit and performed rather than explicitly named. “Gingerbread with a Mirror and Sibiu,” for example, allegorizes city towers, mapping a surreal city and a moral universe at once. In this poem, Ursu’s imagery and juxtapositions, the unexpected turns of her lines and sentences, effect a new and renovating vision:
The person who builds the shadow before the house
gave us his rope knotted
once for each of time’s hearts
then asked us to forget him.
Just like the cellist who kissed my ear
He told me he could hear the sea inside its shell
‘A place unspoiled by noise and kisses may your ear be,’ my grandmother said
while she chopped parsley and let it shower
our family’s soup.
Other poems, like “Poem with Birch Gate” and “Letter to My Son, Mihnea-Dan,” turn that vision on the histories – recent and more distant – of the poet’s Balkan home (the section of the book is titled “Balkan Golgotha)” while a series of poems on and addressed to Ovid exemplify the strong bonds of sympathy and influence Ursu shares with important predecessors (not only the Roman poet exiled to Constanta on the Black Sea, but also Cavafy, Elytis, and others). While I’m not sure (the Pill’s expertise on this score is, alas, limited) whether she is, as Matthew Zapruder has called her, “one of Central Europe’s foremost living poets,” I certainly see the basis in these strongest among Ursu's new poems for the judgment of Tomaz Salamun (my own favorite living Central European poet) that she “makes the Black Sea again” and “expands the places of myth.”
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