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Bezdelki
In Carol Rumens's Bezdelki, small things like the English meaning of her Russian title help to shore up the memory of a life. These elegies for a late partner, written in memory of Yuri Drobyshev, explore the principle that death, even for atheists, isn't purely loss. Instead, a kind of conversation between two people can be continued through willed acts of memory, whether by rooting through incidental artefacts found in a toolbox ('defiant old metals, coupled/irrefutably and awkwardly for life') or by revisiting works of Russian literature that both members of the couple admired. There is a tender goodbye in a hospital, but also the sensual matter of yoghurt spoons, stock cubes and duck pat. In Rumens's pamphlet, translations and imitations of Osip Mandelstam share space with fragments of Egyptian mythology and 'a wardrobe of old sweat-shirts' to convey the powerful, and moving, impulse to 'live with your death unburied at my core'.
36 pages, Paperback
Published February 14, 2018
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 10, 2018
I’ve really enjoyed Carol Rumens’ Bezdelki (The Emma Press). As a reader and person, I was moved. As a reader and writer, I was admiration-struck. For no logical reason, I ended up reading the pamphlet backwards – something that seems undeliberately apt in retrospect, as these are “Poems and Translations in Memory of Yuri Georgievich Drobyshev (Rumens’ late partner), 1932-2015”.
Reading then, and re-reading since in different orders, I have to keep stopping because the poems are so achingly beautiful. Among my favourite images: loss as “I’m two ruined overcoats” in ‘Vidua’. Also the mix of myth and modern-life, and nature’s enduring presence behind, above and beyond human absence. As in:
“Souls clatter like wings,
like netted marsh birds, blind
to everything but their sky.”
(‘King Taharqa’s Last Thoughts’).
Also in the closing poem:
“I could no more believe the sap insensible
than I believe the dead are broken branches,
and all their self-songs censored or extinguished.”
(‘Nant y Garth’)
There are so many striking lines and images in Bezdelki that I now carry with me, with both emotion and literary awe.
Reading then, and re-reading since in different orders, I have to keep stopping because the poems are so achingly beautiful. Among my favourite images: loss as “I’m two ruined overcoats” in ‘Vidua’. Also the mix of myth and modern-life, and nature’s enduring presence behind, above and beyond human absence. As in:
“Souls clatter like wings,
like netted marsh birds, blind
to everything but their sky.”
(‘King Taharqa’s Last Thoughts’).
Also in the closing poem:
“I could no more believe the sap insensible
than I believe the dead are broken branches,
and all their self-songs censored or extinguished.”
(‘Nant y Garth’)
There are so many striking lines and images in Bezdelki that I now carry with me, with both emotion and literary awe.
Displaying 1 of 1 review