Editorial: January 2009

December 28, 2008 The contemplative mood at the start of the fresh year chimes well with that of the work by early twentieth-century Christian poet Jūkichi Yagi, featured this month on PIW in the Japan issue. Jūkichi’s fragmentary poems are characterised by an almost disarming simplicity, which editor Yasuhiro Yotsumoto describes as “a poetic equivalent of naïve painting” and “a manifestation of his religious belief that his poetry should serve not literature itself, but God, simply and honestly”. Jūkichi died aged only 29 of tuberculosis; bed-ridden for a year before his death, many of his poems unsurprisingly reflect on mortality:

Crickets are singing.
They’re singing as if to say,
“If I don’t sing now it’ll be too late.”
Naturally
that makes me cry.

(‘Crickets’)

“If I don’t kill myself it is because I believe in Christ”, Jūkichi wrote, and though desolation and loneliness in facing death runs through work written when he was ill, there are instants of transcendence throughout his poems as simple objects or tiny events are imbued with a sense of wonder and reassuring beauty: the “autumn sky” brings “peace of mind”, a “single, stray pebble bathed in sunlight” is an emblem of hope in a time of illness; the emptiness of a jar causes the poet’s heart to tremble.

Dutch poet Maria van Daalen also pitches everyday, finite human experience against the timelessness of the spiritual world. Van Daalen is an expert on Haitian Vodou, a religion based on a merging of the beliefs and practices of West African peoples with Roman Catholic Christianity, and in 2007 was the first Dutch person to be officially initiated as a Mambo Asogwe (the highest rank of Haitian Vodou priestess). Many of her poems featured in this month’s Netherlands issue invoke religious themes in their expression of personal experience, with titles such as ‘Passion’, ‘Gospel’, ‘Psalm 22’ and ‘Easter’. In the latter, religious, domestic and natural imagery are combined as the narrator parallels the resurrection of Jesus, moving from one “time” to another:

I arise in due course,
just like he, without any effort,
and depart from my past time
until I arrive in my body,
my lair, the bed my soul has selected for itself.

Drying dishes in the kitchen becomes a “holy” act with this strange reincarnation, and in the final lines of the poem, “the dead in the ground” beneath the narrator’s feet are juxtaposed with an image of rebirth:

And somewhere, going to seed, blossoming,
a new garden
and fresh earth.

Colombian poet Luz Mary Giraldo is also alert to the regenerative properties of time. Franca Bacchiega notes that the main focus of Giraldo’s poetic observation is “time, continually renewing and recreating itself. But time in Giraldo’s work has a dual nature: there is real time which passes by, and from which the poet is excluded; but there is also the time of dreams, of hope and poetry.” The constraints of time that govern the physical world don’t apply in poetry – the mortal can be made immortal, the past and present merged, eternity juxtaposed with the world of clocks and calendars. The folding, weaving and knitting of time, particularly via the image of Penelope, is a recurring theme in Giraldo’s evocative poems, as is the presence of birds, which take on varying symbolic significance in association with time and lifespans, for example in ‘Among the Trees’, which captures the rhythm of a woodpecker “hitting hard the bark”:

The millenary bird
hits on the tree of life
and while the leaves fall
the colour of time changes
it drops out like an hourglass
it beats slowly
slower every time
slower
slow.

Also featured in the Colombia issue this month is Myriam Montoya, a Paris-based Colombian whose poetic focus on uprootings and migration creates a universe both mythic and grounded in immediacy. Like the continual taps of the woodpecker in Giraldo’s poem, the beats of a heart become an emblem of repeated moments of human history and a warning drum of the future in her poem ‘Huellas’:

I feel your pulse with soft fingertips
A repeated gong
I count millennia of gestation
The wanderings of continents
A drop repeating itself

Federico Díaz-Granados, the final poet of this issue, considers time from a more personal point of view, reflecting on the difficulties of returning to the jumbled memories and imaginings of childhood as an adult in ‘Characters in a Childhood Landscape’, or in ‘Lodging House’ envisaging himself as a building through which different people pass as the years go by in. The most striking of his poems is perhaps ‘The Metropol Cake Shop’, in which the narrator contemplates his own reflection, rather surreally superimposed on a display of vanilla cakes in a shop window. The cakes somehow accentuate his conception of himself as “fat and tired”, an unrecognisable “stranger in the glass”. It’s a January kind of poem too – a re-assessment of one’s place in the present in relation to future generations as well as lost friends and the “dead grandfathers and uncles” of the past that continue to hover like “shadows”.

Whether you are easing yourself into 2009 via recollections and resolutions or seizing the here-and-now, on behalf of everyone at Poetry International I wish you all a healthy and happy new year.