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Ribwort
With the help of poetry, Hanna Komar has been healing her personal wounds. This is where her art has been life-saving for her.
RIBWORT is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it's not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it. Eventually it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a leaf of ribwort can help to heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen. Listen with compassion and without fear, without getting defensive or running away. This is what keeps us going. In the summer of 2021, Hanna Komar brought the script for this book to a publisher in Belarus. He told her his business was going to be shut down for her protest poems. He couldn't publish them. Since then, almost all independent publishers of Belarusian books in the Belarusian language have had their business suspended or liquidated. Books have been labelled "extremist" and people have been imprisoned for selling or owning them, while writers have been persecuted for writing them. This is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of the repressions which unfolded in Belarus when the people stood up against the falsified election results on 9 August 2020 and the violence which followed afterwards. Every day, still, dozens of people are arrested in Belarus on political grounds. Some call that summer the awakening of Belarusians; others call it the birth of a new, free Belarus. No matter what it's called, these years have felt for the nation, and for the author of this poems, like unlearning what was already learnt helplessness. Yet these have also been maturing years through courage, solidarity, hope, pain, suffering, and disillusionment. A lot of wounds have opened. This book doesn't start with the protest poems of 2020. It consists of sections which tell about the poet's relationship with her parents and with herself, about her romantic relationships, about her relationship with her homeland, and the poetry of civil resistance. Each of them is administering a leaf of ribwort to help the wounds heal. Translated from Belarusian by the author, with the English version edited by the American poet Mary Kollar. "Hanna Komar's poems display a refined ear for sound and sense both in Belarusian and translated by her into English. Her poems move seamlessly from the personal to the political, speaking with the urgency of a life experienced with compassion, dignity and resolve."--Mary Kollar, poet and educator, USA "Komar's poetry quenches our thirst for truth. These are poems that brim with clear, bracing, live-giving."--Clare Pollard "Hanna Komar's poems are a rumbling ache in the heart, a low cry in the darkness against oppression - of the people of her native Belarus, crushed by Lukashenko's brutal regime, and of so many women through the centuries everywhere. Searingly honest, yet brimful of human sympathy, this collection seeps into your mind with its powerful conviction and determination to alert the world to what truly matters."--John Farndon "Komar never turns away, always gifted equally in the expression of grief and love, in anger and tenderness, in after and before. A life torn down the centre finds something beautiful in RIBWORT - and, we sense as its reader, something almost inadmissible, something of hope. Anyone unsure of the power of poetry in translation should take RIBWORT as their remedy."--James Appleby Poetry.
RIBWORT is a space to sit down with your pain and listen. You may think it's not helpful, like a leaf of ribwort on a bleeding wound. The pain will probably be growing more and more acute, but if you face it, if you hold space for it. Eventually it will shrink to the size of a scratch which a leaf of ribwort can help to heal. When we have healed, we become leaves of ribwort for others, so we can sit down with their pain and listen. Listen with compassion and without fear, without getting defensive or running away. This is what keeps us going. In the summer of 2021, Hanna Komar brought the script for this book to a publisher in Belarus. He told her his business was going to be shut down for her protest poems. He couldn't publish them. Since then, almost all independent publishers of Belarusian books in the Belarusian language have had their business suspended or liquidated. Books have been labelled "extremist" and people have been imprisoned for selling or owning them, while writers have been persecuted for writing them. This is just a tiny tip of the iceberg of the repressions which unfolded in Belarus when the people stood up against the falsified election results on 9 August 2020 and the violence which followed afterwards. Every day, still, dozens of people are arrested in Belarus on political grounds. Some call that summer the awakening of Belarusians; others call it the birth of a new, free Belarus. No matter what it's called, these years have felt for the nation, and for the author of this poems, like unlearning what was already learnt helplessness. Yet these have also been maturing years through courage, solidarity, hope, pain, suffering, and disillusionment. A lot of wounds have opened. This book doesn't start with the protest poems of 2020. It consists of sections which tell about the poet's relationship with her parents and with herself, about her romantic relationships, about her relationship with her homeland, and the poetry of civil resistance. Each of them is administering a leaf of ribwort to help the wounds heal. Translated from Belarusian by the author, with the English version edited by the American poet Mary Kollar. "Hanna Komar's poems display a refined ear for sound and sense both in Belarusian and translated by her into English. Her poems move seamlessly from the personal to the political, speaking with the urgency of a life experienced with compassion, dignity and resolve."--Mary Kollar, poet and educator, USA "Komar's poetry quenches our thirst for truth. These are poems that brim with clear, bracing, live-giving."--Clare Pollard "Hanna Komar's poems are a rumbling ache in the heart, a low cry in the darkness against oppression - of the people of her native Belarus, crushed by Lukashenko's brutal regime, and of so many women through the centuries everywhere. Searingly honest, yet brimful of human sympathy, this collection seeps into your mind with its powerful conviction and determination to alert the world to what truly matters."--John Farndon "Komar never turns away, always gifted equally in the expression of grief and love, in anger and tenderness, in after and before. A life torn down the centre finds something beautiful in RIBWORT - and, we sense as its reader, something almost inadmissible, something of hope. Anyone unsure of the power of poetry in translation should take RIBWORT as their remedy."--James Appleby Poetry.
- GenresPoetry
132 pages, Paperback
Published September 7, 2023
14 people want to read
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February 25, 2024
Hanna Komar’s Ribwort (2022, tr: 2023) is a poetry collection that calls for healing, using the titular plant as a metaphor for soothing emotional wounds. It’s a bilingual edition, showing the poems in their original Belarussian alongside the poet’s translations. The first section showcases a series of personal poems that examine the poet and what has scarred her, while the latter part lifts us beyond introspection into the heart of a wider movement, of protest and solidarity as the wounded woman comes to represent her wounded motherland.
The opening poem, Dublin Night, sees Komar sitting in the Irish capital somewhat dissociated from the party atmosphere around her. Inviting the salve of another to “wrap around me / like ribwort” it hints at a need for affection and consolation, something that recurs through these poems. In Not What I Wanted Her To Be, she longs for a bedfellow to comfort her, using her mother’s methods as an example (“when I’d get sick as a child / she’d check my temperature / and give me medication / rather than lying next to me”) of what she doesn’t want.
Beyond familiar relationships, there are love interests, equally damaging. In Advice, a passing woman suggests her best outcome in life is to be married. In Through The Dark Woods she realises she’s not at the centre of the world, which becomes clear later in the quick one-two of Sharp - where “simply a rib removed” is a scalpel cut across the nature of a man “looking for / other smooth-skinned bodies” - and Non-Monogamy, where:
But there are other concerns, that link to inner turmoil. In Listen Komar castigates herself for not taking advice. In In the Quiet of My Body a stomach churns as she struggles to grasp “my deafness to the polyphony of fate”. In A Book From the Sky her need for expression is in want of a voice. (“No matter how many voices / teach me to speak / I remain illiterate”).
Literacy, through many voices, comes when the poetry shifts to the national, observing the 2020 protests in Minsk. A dramatic account, based on an oral interview, of a couple’s taking to the streets against “a wall of police”, leading to torture and imprisonment. When Komar writes “And I limped / and limp-ed / and lim-p-ed / all the way to jail” we can practically see the pained movement. Where setbacks exist, hope and determination blooms in We Couldn't Find You (“when it’s over / i will help you paint / these bare walls / white / red / white”), and the resistance is encouraged - at Niamiha, “One enough is not enough”; at Puškinskaja “we’re ninety-seven percent / and each one of us brings flowers.” - in the call for a better world for those Belarussians suffering, as Spring notes, “the accident of birth”.
It’s clear that the two sections work in tandem, with the first seeing Komar look to heal herself with the metaphorical ribwort, finding a voice, and in the latter part, on the streets of Minsk, a means to use it. Where the reflective poems are short and personal, their experiences pan out to the universal and timeless. The immediacy of the more blatantly political poems are charged with both anger and the freshness of the experience. Closing poem, When It’s Over, licks the bruises of recent years but sings with resolve (“we will tell / how we survived”) for the future, of the country, and those caught up in its turmoil for whom candles stay lit.
The opening poem, Dublin Night, sees Komar sitting in the Irish capital somewhat dissociated from the party atmosphere around her. Inviting the salve of another to “wrap around me / like ribwort” it hints at a need for affection and consolation, something that recurs through these poems. In Not What I Wanted Her To Be, she longs for a bedfellow to comfort her, using her mother’s methods as an example (“when I’d get sick as a child / she’d check my temperature / and give me medication / rather than lying next to me”) of what she doesn’t want.
Beyond familiar relationships, there are love interests, equally damaging. In Advice, a passing woman suggests her best outcome in life is to be married. In Through The Dark Woods she realises she’s not at the centre of the world, which becomes clear later in the quick one-two of Sharp - where “simply a rib removed” is a scalpel cut across the nature of a man “looking for / other smooth-skinned bodies” - and Non-Monogamy, where:
my river
nourishes plenty of life
but can’t
quench the thirst
of your roots
which are searching for
other springs.
But there are other concerns, that link to inner turmoil. In Listen Komar castigates herself for not taking advice. In In the Quiet of My Body a stomach churns as she struggles to grasp “my deafness to the polyphony of fate”. In A Book From the Sky her need for expression is in want of a voice. (“No matter how many voices / teach me to speak / I remain illiterate”).
Literacy, through many voices, comes when the poetry shifts to the national, observing the 2020 protests in Minsk. A dramatic account, based on an oral interview, of a couple’s taking to the streets against “a wall of police”, leading to torture and imprisonment. When Komar writes “And I limped / and limp-ed / and lim-p-ed / all the way to jail” we can practically see the pained movement. Where setbacks exist, hope and determination blooms in We Couldn't Find You (“when it’s over / i will help you paint / these bare walls / white / red / white”), and the resistance is encouraged - at Niamiha, “One enough is not enough”; at Puškinskaja “we’re ninety-seven percent / and each one of us brings flowers.” - in the call for a better world for those Belarussians suffering, as Spring notes, “the accident of birth”.
It’s clear that the two sections work in tandem, with the first seeing Komar look to heal herself with the metaphorical ribwort, finding a voice, and in the latter part, on the streets of Minsk, a means to use it. Where the reflective poems are short and personal, their experiences pan out to the universal and timeless. The immediacy of the more blatantly political poems are charged with both anger and the freshness of the experience. Closing poem, When It’s Over, licks the bruises of recent years but sings with resolve (“we will tell / how we survived”) for the future, of the country, and those caught up in its turmoil for whom candles stay lit.
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