Vo(i)ces II - A Review by Cathy Bryant

VO(I)CES II - A REVIEW BY CATHY BRYANT

Vo(i)ces II is an anthology of the winning and commended poems from The Victorina Press Vo(i)ces Poetry Award, and as such is a celebration or get-together of sorts. Like parties, prize anthologies vary enormously, and the reader may or may not want to attend. Fortunately, this is one book to engage with if you possibly can. It’s so beautifully organised, and the people there are so fascinating!

The agreeably broad theme was Life, Death and Beyond. Any poet has experiences that pertain to this, so I expect that there were many entries. The twelve in this volume are all strong and well-written, and interpret the theme in original and different ways. This is an extract from one of the winners, Sarah Leavesley’s ‘Overgrown’:

Night falls, but light refuses
to leave this garden quietly.
Blood moons blossom from knots

in the wood. The trellis bends
beneath the heaviness
of their throbbing petals.

The joint winner, ‘The First of November’ by Virginia Ramos Poseck, is completely different in approach, tone and imagery. The narrator of this poem says of her home that it:

is closed off by the nacre
carapace of a tortoise
I carry it on my shoulders
with its helmet of tapestries and books

The judges praised the musicality of this poem, and I agree with them. I’d happily show you the whole thing! Anyway, these two poems show what an exciting mix there is in the anthology.

The poems are in English and Spanish, which adds another aspect to the book. Comparing the two is fascinating, as one can compare the poetic techniques and effects in both languages. For example, in Mabel Encinas’ poem ‘Perhaps Death Means Coming Back to Your Mother’, we have the line:

Perhaps death is the mother of total consolation

In Spanish, the line is:

Tal vez la muerte es la madre que todo lo consuela

In English the line is beautiful and meaningful, but in Spanish the alliteration of ‘madre’ and ‘muerte’ bring the concepts even closer together.

In Mark Totterdell’s richly evocative poem ‘Sussex’, we have names and nuances that are steeped in English history and culture: flint and barrows, the white horse, the names of pubs.

This must have been a challenge for those who translated this into Spanish. For instance, the line

the long man upped staves and abandoned his hillside

became

el hombre gigante levantaba bastones y abandonaba su ladera

which has different nuances while retaining the sense and power of the English. I particularly liked the translator’s footnote to this poem:

El Star, el George, el Smuggler’s, el Eight bells, el Ox, el Rose Cottage, el Tiger son pubs en Sussex.

Mandy Macdonald’s poem, ‘Three Postcards from Havana’, is as short as the title suggests, but that doesn’t impinge on the strength of the poem at all. Here’s part of the first ‘postcard’:

I know now
the exact spot where a joy
has always lived in the same little room
waiting for you to visit

The other two stanzas deal with absence, and then the return of tranquility. Not easy to pull off in a few lines, but Macdonald manages it with simple beauty. 

I must mention Lee Nash’s ‘The Cygnet’, in which a church singer is asked to perform Saint-Saëns ‘Le Cygne’ at the funeral of a child. This is perhaps the most narrative poem in the book, and one of the most moving. It’s all the more powerful because the singer, narrating the poem, didn’t know the child:

so much grief,
it’s impossible to tell which is Mummy

until I spot her,
the wet slags of her eyes unmistakeable,
her slack weight supported from behind in a vice
by her new man,
a smudge of tattoo fresh on his Adam’s apple –

Here’s the final line, with its pain but a touch of hope, in Spanish:

No Soy Ángel
Pero Tengo Alas

Keith Jarrett’s poem ‘Instructions for My Death’ is a jolt of the unexpected, with powerful imagery and the impression of the narrator (and the poet’s!) strength and imagination. Here’s a delicious extract:

And if anyone asks, tell them
I dreamt of islands on fire
And dirty windows closing
Like bibles in the wind

Another poem I’d like to show in full, because it’s so full!

David Bleiman’s poem ‘Funeral Plan’ is on a similar theme to Jarrett’s, but different in approach. It’s observant and also witty:

There will be a playlist, still to be finalised.
On my current form,
Don’t buy Daddy any more whiskey
Might hit the spot.

In a poem about death, a laugh can be extra rewarding.

‘Uncle Pedro’ by Lester Gómez Medina is filled with Spanish words and concepts, and those whose Spanish is better than mine will find that version the best. In English it still sweeps the reader into Spain:

Two things would break Uncle Pedro:
the scorch of midday rising through his bare feet,

hard as stone from never wearing shoes.
The guarón scouring his throat, flowing into his veins.

This clear portrait is extremely evocative, and I had the rare pleasure of wishing that a poem was longer!

Another Spanish/Hispanic poem is by the indigenous Mexican/Spanish/British poet Marina Sánchez – ‘Choosing Mother’s Last Flowers’. I couldn’t help expecting a poem about dithering over different lovely blooms, but oh no! This is a wonderfully certain poem, using its subject matter to demonstrate the bond between daughter and mother. Sánchez wrote both versions of the poem, and also translated some of the other poems. She is very talented!

Finally (though I haven’t reviewed these in the book order – I’ve hopped about all over the place with playful joy) we come to ‘Death Came Twice’ by Caroline Hickman Vaughan. This is the sort of poem with a bold idea in it, and here it’s used to evoke emotion in the reader. Well, I was a mess. The poem has all the disparate things that one thinks of at a funeral, from the sun biting the windshield to little pink cakes, and what the deceased would think of the funeral. It’s very well done.

I know it’s fashionable to find some negatives too, to show that I’m not a partial and soppy reviewer. There aren’t any, though. The judges’ and translators’ reports are full, and filled with both the knowledge and the love of poetry. The bios of the poets at the end are informative and not constrained to a short sentence or two. The contents page shows in which language the poem was submitted, and to which language it was translated. I found that fascinating.

I think I almost found a fault – I would have liked page numbers on the contents page, so that I could find and reread the poems as quickly as possible. But in every other way I felt honoured to read and review a book of this quality. It’s outstanding, both in content and production. A labour of love and skill.

Here, thankfully, is the sort of prize anthology the poetry lover should make every attempt to read. Like the best parties and celebrations, those involved are intelligent, compassionate, keen observers, and imaginative creators. Come in! Bienvenida!

 (Vo(i)ces II launches February 2023 – available online from www.victorinapress.com or can be ordered from all bookshops) 

CATHY BRYANT

Cathy Bryant has won 32 literary awards and writing competitions, and she co-edited Best of Manchester Poets Volumes 1, 2 and 3. As well as judging prose and poetry comps, she has had four books published: Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature, Look at All the Women, Erratics, (all poetry) and How to Win Writing Competitions (nonfiction). She lives in Salford with her writer husband.

A Note on Caroline Vaughan's 'Death Came Twice' – David Rigsbee

Homer’s Odyssey tells us of Odysseus’ descent to the underworld in Book XI, where he meets his dead mother Anticlia and learns that she died of grief over the absence of her son. In spite of the misery of her departure, Odysseus learns a great deal about what happened in Ithaca during his two decades away. He also feels again the love of his mother, who unburdens herself, having been refreshed by a cup of blood he furnishes to animate her and give her powers of speech, but the moment is temporary, which means under the regime of unforgiving time. He makes three attempts to take her in his arms, but each time he realises that he only embraces a mist. Still, he reemerges from the land of the dead firm in the belief that he was doing the right thing and that his mother, even dead, loved him.

In the sixth book of The Aeneid, Aeneas records his journey to the underworld, where he meets with his dead father Anchises in the Elysian Fields. During the encounter, Anchises offers his son a vision of his future lineage and commends him on his quest to reestablish the Trojan line in Italy and later to become one of the founders of Rome and all that follows that.  His father, being in eternity, can see the future, which is, for the living, the extension of time into a question mark. Virgil presents Aeneas as a leader in search of approval. Before he finds his father, he encounters the deceased figure of Dido, the queen of Carthage, whose love and marriage he has rejected in order to forge on with his god-inspired mission. Dido had responded to his desertion by climbing onto her funeral pyre and impaling herself with a sword. As the hero’s ships pull out, Aeneas can see the smoke rising from the pyre but is unaware of its source. Thus he learns the consequences of his choice of duty over love and witnesses Dido’s bitter withdrawal among the other shades, glimpsing as she recedes, her glaring former husband. Despite this regret, the deep chagrin, and the histrionics of the scorned lover, Aeneas’ matters of the heart must give way to the clarion call of duty.

This is how the passage has been taught, and its dilemma has come down to us more pronounced than settled case law. And yet, how we understand the encounter and its takeaways has changed in our era. In other words, the elegy has moved to the forefront of meaningful utterance by casting off many of the cushioning conventions and illusions that sustained us in the past. I have suggested elsewhere that I take it to be the most important genre in poetry. Why would I make such a claim? Because the elegy situates itself between presence and absence and asks in what way (if any way) can language find meaning where there is no echo. In other words, it brings up the hardest questions. In our era, the elegy now serves up its paradox stripped of civic and religious baggage. We want to honour our parents, for example, but we no longer believe they can give us blessings or commendations from beyond the grave. The great Stanley Kunitz’ central theme was the loss of his father by suicide when he was four. In his landmark poem, 'Father and Son', we see the latter as he bounds through the woods—his selva oscura—to the marsh, where he summons his dead father from the water in which he drowned, desperate for guidance, love, and acknowledgement, only to find that "Among the turtles and the lilies he turned to me/the white ignorant hollow of his face".

The elegy has now evolved into a starker version in which there is no expectation that the dead will somehow appear to bless us as we go on in our lives, and even if they should (or could), such a thing would be met with instinctive disbelief. Caroline Hickman Vaughan, praised for her captivating photographic work, which includes numerous portraits of her father before his death, writes in the remarkable, haunting elegy 'Death Came Twice' of a dreamlike encounter in which her father, now deceased, appears in his own hearse and addresses her. The poem opens deliberately and matter-of-factly, "I never said goodbye to my father", which establishes the strictly confessional mode that will be enlarged by the dreamscape that follows, that is, "my childhood home". We are in one of those conditions where both time and place have lost their usual dimensions, where "I grasped his hand, transporting him to my house/miles away, yet we only took twelve steps". If time and space go haywire, as they can in dreams, logic itself falls apart. There is only the supremacy of the image, in Vaughan’s poem, a tender one, powered by memory and wish-fulfilment:

It was hot for September. Windows down,
father was in back eating petit fours, pink ones,
clouded in the aroma of sweet, sweet sugar.
I stuck my head in the window.
Are they good, Dad? I asked.
He’d always had a sweet tooth.

The mystery of his condition, as if he is in some kind of bardo—and beyond the mystery of how he came to appear in the first place, becomes vivid in the contrast between violence and gentleness that Vaughan offers:

Sun bit the windshield,
slicing through him like a knife.
I saw the door handle on the other side.
Translucent light breathed him
the way moon slides through clouds.

The father emerges from the car, and his daughter helps him, his head bobbing, into the house. They both know he belongs there, and she puts him to bed, where she feels the warmth of his hand. It’s as if in putting him on his deathbed, he is at his most poignantly human ("I need to rest. I’m tired./Where I’m going there will be no more little pink cakes."), having left the hearse where he was sliced by sunlight. Like Odysseus with his mother, the daughter forces the issue by reaching to embrace him, coming up with only the comforter in her arms. He is now nothing, defying any attempt at being revived (there is nothing to revive).  

Someone once said that the loveliest word in the English language is “stay". This poem reminded me of that, and of the wistful question that John Ashbery made when he wrote, "What is there to do but stay?/ And that we cannot do". Vaughan’s poem gives us a brilliant example of the elegy’s power to reckon with the beloved dead and to wring meaning from the air. My mentor, the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, in referencing W. H. Auden, remarked that "if time worships language, then language is greater than time". It gives us a loophole to escape the threat of oblivion. Mallarmé famously wrote that "everything exists to wind up in a book". You may find that cold comfort, but Caroline Vaughan doesn’t. Neither do I. It was in this way that the gods themselves survived.

This poem, and its graceful translation, makes a vivid and fitting contribution to Vo(i)ces II, itself a gem of a collection of new voices, original and translated. Readers will be dazzled by the reach of this volume. 

—David Rigsbee 

David Rigsbee

 

David Rigsbee is author of over 20 books in poetry, non-fiction, translation and criticism. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review,The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review and Vogue. He is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Pushcart Prize, two Fellowships in Literature from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities (for The American Academy in Rome), The Djerassi Foundation, The Jentel Foundation, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well an Award from the Academy of American Poets. Currently he works as a manuscript consultant and book reviewer. His latest book is a translation of Dante’s Paradiso (2023).  His Watchman in the Knife Factory:  New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in 2024.

 

A graduate of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill as a Morehead Scholar (B.A. in English and Russian—summa cum laude), he attended the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (M.A.), Hollins University (M.A.L.S. in philosophy), and the University of Virginia (Ph.D. in English). He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.