Before the Drought

by Margo Berdeshevsky

Here, Margo Berdeshevsky offers us vast interiorities—sensuous, erotic, complexly feminine. These poems may be distinguished for their musical intricacy and formal variation, but they are also profoundly moving, their speakers subsumed in memory, the constant presence of their bodies, the certainty mortality, and the intrusive violence of the worlds they inhabit. This is a marvelous, deeply humane collection—one I will return to with pleasure.
—Kevin Prufer

Genres: Poetry

102 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2017

About the author

MARGO BERDESHEVSKY, born in New York City, often lives and writes in Paris. Her brand new book is IT IS STILL BEAUTIFUL TO HEAR THE HEART BEAT from SALMON POETRY in Ireland!! Her recent book was KNEEL SAID THE NIGHT(a hybrid book in half-notes) from Sundress Publications. Her other collections include "Before the Drought," from Glass Lyre Press, a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Berdeshevsky is author as well of "Between Soul & Stone" and "But a Passage in Wilderness" (Sheep Meadow Press). Her book of illustrated stories, "Beautiful Soon Enough," received the first Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Award for FC2 (University of Alabama Press). She is also the recipient of the grand prize for the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, while other honors include the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her work appears in Poetry International, New Letters, The Night Heron Barks, Kenyon Review, Plume, Scoundrel Time, The Collagist, Tupelo Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Southern Humanities Review, Harbor Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The American Journal of Poetry, Jacar—One, Mānoa, Pirene’s Fountain, Big Other, and Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Bracken, among many others. In Europe and the UK, her works have been seen in The Poetry Review, PN Review, The Wolf, Europe, Siècle 21, Confluences Poétiques, Recours au Poème, Levure Littéraire, and Under the Radar. Her “Letters from Paris” have appeared for many years in Poetry International online, for example: https://poetryinternationalonline.com... She may be found reading from her books in London, Paris, New York City, Los Angeles, Honolulu, at literary festivals, and/or somewhere new in the world. For more information, go to her website http://margoberdeshevsky.com

 

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can work so haunted by destruction — a nightmare looming in their very title — explode lushly with such lush & vital metaphors? Images like “The boots of war are sweating,” and “A chapel stained incarnadine, open, under / iodine sheets,” sound a wakeup & at times even offer redemption, in the ravaged world of Margo Berdeshevsky’s third poetry collection (she also has an award-winning cross-genre text). BEFORE THE DROUGHT never shies from horrors, though these include more familiar depredations like growing old; the author is a late bloomer, confounded by “Body my deceiver / Body my taunt.” Also, in elegies that recall W.S. Merwin, she mourns the damaged environment: “the long-clouds that know the herds of lost.” Overall DROUGHT proves substantive, with more than 40 poems, most running a full page, & the title piece considerably longer. Rhymes play occasional peek-a-boo, like “incarnadine” and “iodine,” & so does rhythm; the poet’s most common form, reliant on long lines in pairs, feels neither flat nor sing-song. Still, amid such finely tooled variety, always ripe with the sensory, what lingers most are those pieces that grapple with the ubiquitous barbarity of our global moment. The recent massacres in Paris, the author’s current home, haunt these pages, wailing over “gunned children’s empty now/ open armed embrace,” & suffering, throughout, “under the same wide sky/ that lists to blood-fall of a beheaded son.” Amid such violence, the artist brings together her cry for humanity with a dream of sanctuary: “Cave that has no bullet holes/ but song — Call me in — .“ The upshot is that the best poems, like “Half Moon Holy,” feel like lasting testimony to contemporary terrors. Overall, I've got to agree with Carolyn Forché & her ringing endorsement: “a book to read at the precipice on which we stand.”
-- Adapted from a review in CUTTHROAT.

[Kathleen Spivack · Rating 5 out of 5]

Margo Berdeshevsky is a bravura poet. Her poems flash in many directions. They are intelligent, felt, and full of amazing images. Before the Drought is her best book so far but I feel that way about all of her work, which comes from a deep well of imagination and feeling. As in any great poetry the meaning is in the spaces between the lines. Her poems challenge the reader.

For instance, the poem titled Only Looking For her Double Headed Tribe, consist of only seven words: "… Woman of minds," (and in approximately eight spaces later) "…and so am I –". Her poems cause one to dream. They call on the imagination. Margo Berdeshevsky’s poems range widely for their inspiration. They look into the classical world, the natural world and the world of women today. Follow her work, you will not regret it.

- Kathleen Spivack -
Novel “Unspeakable Things” pub. Alfred A Knopf, 2016/17.

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Margo Berdeshevsky’s Before the Drought is, alternately, elegy, jeremiad, prophecy, disturbing phantasmagoria, impassioned love letter to Paris, and startling act of witness, these “filthy poems” and “harsh songs of desire” exploring the vectors in and within “words and frames and walls.” Ghosts and other beings people these visceral and ethereal poems, Apollinaire, Benjamin, Levi, Verlaine, Kuan Hsiu, Monet, Merwin, Jarrell, Colette, and (Rosmarie) Waldrop among the interlocutors.

Soaring things wing through these pages, moths and herons especially, but also rooks, mourning doves, orioles, owls, fruit flies, cardinals, blackbirds, sparrows, pigeons, egrets, and even phoenixes. Like Farrokhzad, who provides an epigraph for one of the poems here, Berdeshevsky is compelled to heed birds’ calls to “commit flight to memory,” flight as movement, flight as brilliant, imaginative, free expression. Reading, you’ll see red: blood, rubies, lava, flames, and “the bright red hat of virginity.” Inventive hyphenated compounds abound, each one evocatively expressing the difficult or impossible to say: “body-beloved-bully,” “swallow-corpses,” “Body-monster,” “brain-beat,” “kiss-humping,” “sex-legged,” “cut-a-limb,” “swell-bellied-pregnant,” “woman-ing,” “heaven-hung,” “night-net,” “blood-fall,” “blood-moon,” “dove-moan,” “cloud-exploded,” “leaf-fall-fire.”

Before the Drought is a lyrical reliquary, where you’ll find bone, skin, fire, love, bombs, ghosts, soldiers, and mothers, and so much more, each bravely written poem a vital, pulsating companion during these “frayed days.”

[Eric Shaffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Big fan of sentences that I am, I found a good number of wonders in these pages. Here are some of my favorites: "Sparrow, eye on a god with no name/ for us, what did you find?" "Let my fingers enter your eyes./ If I blind you this time,/ it will only--I promise--be twilight." "Stars are the bones of the ancestors, we said--under so much night." "You want so badly to be seen you'd paint eyes on the lids of the blind, my ghost said." I also and particularly love the phrases "evil twin of blue" and "regrets at the edge of rain"; I may even compose a work (or two) to explore and do homage to these. "For Sisters Everywhere, Even on St. Valentine's Day" is my absolute favorite poem of the volume, with "Stage Fright"following in a close second. For those looking for lines that move and impress, this is the book for you.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of unique works. Something I feel I'll read through several times. One that gave me chills and still sticks with me was 'No Modifier At All' on page 21 for the Paris massacres in November 2015.