This is a reprint of a review I wrote for Poetry Review earlier this year.
- Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
- Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, When the Wanderers Come Home
- George Szirtes, Mapping the Delta
Roots and belonging, journeys and homecoming, the fallout
from conflict, the raging political self and the devastated personal self all
feature in these three topical collections. Joy Harjo sings the long song of
Native American history with bluesy devotion, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley returns to
her native Liberia from America to scour the remains, collect war stories and
find herself while George Szirtes watches with an ironical eye as people come
and go, falling in love, travelling, experiencing bereavement and somehow
moving on.
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is a fierce
summoning, opening not so much with a dedication as an anointing: “Bless the
poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache,
the visionaries”. Joy Harjo’s elision of poetry, song, activism, physical movement,
lament and prophecy imbues her collection with an exhilarating vitality. Harjo
is a Creek Nation Native American, yet she does not write resigned elegies to a
lost people or an erased culture. Instead, her identity gives her poetic voice a
hearty survivalism, an earthy constancy and great humour. In ‘Calling The
Spirit Back From Wandering the Earth in its Human Feet’ she counsels the reader
in a magazine list of half ironic affirmations, rejecting self pity in favour
of the larger story of group survival: “Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the
speeches short./ Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way
through the dark.”
Harjo’s poems jazz-step from one to the next, with
evocations of cool urban life interspersed with untitled, dry, best-friend
jokes like “Do not feed the monsters./ Some are wandering thought forms,
looking for a place to set up house” and stunning natural imagery in which a
panther “is a poem of fire green eyes and a heart charged by four winds of four
directions”, as in the long title poem at the heart of the collection.
In easily flowing conversational lines, Harjo fuses the
mythic with the realist, the sentimental with the elemental. In ‘Talking With
The Sun’ she comments casually, “I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square
at dawn to find the sun.” Yet she is no idler; the walk is part of a ritual to
present her fourth granddaughter “to the sun, as a relative, as one of us.” The
poem closes with her, the sun and the baby joined in “this connection, this
promise.”
Connection is the driving impulse behind this collection,
which is full of images of singing and dancing and invitations to a collective celebration,
where even sorrow is shared. In ‘Mother Field’ the narrator can’t resist “the
music humping through the door” of a bar. Later, in a brilliant image, she
writes that “Midnight is a horn player warmed up tight for the last set.” Like
a consummate band leader the collection carries us through the darkness, just
as Harjo instructed in that early poem. It ends, indeed, with a lovely tribute
called ‘Sunrise’, in which we all “move with the lightness of being, and we
will go/ Where there’s a place for us.”
In Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s powerful When The Wanderers
Come Home, the search for a place of arrival, self-recognition and
remembrance continues, but doesn’t find a resting place. Wesley was born in
Liberia but settled in America; this pained and poignant collection focuses on
her return to Liberia. She traces relatives, interviews women war survivors and
figuratively and literally searches through the detritus of violence, poverty
and natural decay to uncover the past. In ‘Erecting Stones’ the past is fragmented,
“trash”, “debris”, “broken pieces” mixed up with “remnants of bombs…missile
splinters, old pieces of shells.”
In ‘Coming Home’ Wesley describes “dust from the past,/ eating
away the present” and indeed the whole collection carries a note of wariness, a
fear of imminent violence, of impermanence and mistrust in which history is
always threatening to repeat itself and “Liberia smells again of corpses”
(‘Send Me Some Black Clothes’). In the aftermath of violence, the text crawls with
images of decay, of consumption by scorpions, locusts and termites, “the eater
of all life”. Wesley sees herself not as a noble witness or a returning
countrywoman but “an outsider, at the doorpost” (‘So I Stand Here’) who is
“standing among caskets” (‘Send Me Some Black Clothes’), “a lone traveller/
without a country” (‘In My Dream’).
The Liberia of Wesley’s childhood has been transformed into
a place of numb, shell-shocked survivors – “death was more alive than us,” she
writes, devastatingly, in ‘The Cities We Lost’. In ‘Becoming Ghost’ she
conducts interviews with women who have survived unimaginable abuses and considers
“how each one of us carries between our/ breasts, stories no one will believe.”
Despite the brokenness of what she describes, Wesley’s poetic form is smooth
and steady, the neat stanzas and non-rhyming couplets capably containing the
most shocking revelations. The horror is belied, however, by the line breaks,
which do not occur at the natural end of a thought or image but as a gasp of
awful realisation – as when the sun falls “on the backs of children/ who may
never grow up” (‘I Go Home’).
Wesley pays particular tribute to women’s resilience, from
the South African protest singer Miriam Makeba whose band’s records sounded “as
though its players were born playing” to an ode to Hurricane Sandy, in which
she jokes that “A woman by herself is category 7 hurricane.” There are further
works written on journeys to and from Colombia, Libya, America and Morocco, but
at heart When the Wanderers Come Home is a grieving love letter to
Liberia, a country that contains her story just as she tries to contain all its
stories, woman and country intertwined like “branches and limbs of the same oak”
(‘When Monrovia Rises’).
Both When the Wanderers Come Home and Conflict
Resolution for Holy Beings express the determination to pay testimony and
bear witness, sorrow at the repetitiveness of human cruelty and the ferocious
optimism of artists determined to resist, rebuild and revive. Joy Harjo collects
us in a defiant party against the darkness while Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
carefully pieces together the lost stories of the living dead. Meanwhile, George
Szirtes offers an airily delicate and tender take on belonging. Mapping the
Delta portrays human life as a precious daily struggle of small victories in
which human encounters like love affairs, artistic anxiety, hotel stays and
hospital visits are bright pinpricks compared to the inscrutable largesse of
nature. Mapping the Delta is a subtle, panoramic work which starts with
the distant but affectionate focus of the title poem, in which time and tide
literally wait for no man:
The river was charted but now the tide rises
and presses on and moves between tongues
of land to emerge in a mouth that blazes
with its own ideas, its own flickering songs.
(Mapping the Delta)
The happy idea of the natural world singing, of the earth
generating its own verses in its own language, flows through the collection, as
does the appreciation for conversation generally. There are constant references
to social groups, singing and lively banter : a crowd in a cinema queuing excitedly
to watch an early talkie, a drunk man muttering in a bar. ‘The Voices’ is a daft riot in
which the night streets reverberate with voices “shouting
nonsense…reiterations, cries, endless repeats”, its easy rhymes –
floor/door/more, stairs/bears/affairs – creating a riddling verse that is both a
descriptive celebration and an expression of human exuberance.
Compared to messy humanity, nature is sober, eloquent and a
good listener. In ‘Listening to the Weather’ the narrator imagines an entire
landscape focused on the sound of itself as the rains break and “words poured/
out of drains into gardens”. The landscape is in dignified private conversation
with itself: “when the winds spoke…the rain heard.” The earth is sentient,
while seemingly still things are full of tension: “The lake strained to hear/
the utterances of light”.
Despite the impeccable, featherweight construction of the
poems, their breathy rhythm and modish references to everyone from Elaine
Feinstein and Auden to Bruno Schulz, Chet Baker, Bartók and Rembrandt, this is
not a whimsical metropolitan amusement. Mapping the Delta touches upon nearly
every meaningful human experience, every ‘moment’ in a lifespan, from falling
in love to losing a parent – as in the beautiful, long sequence The Yellow
Room, Szirtes’s cautious and ambivalent rumination on his late father, “you
mystery, father of diminishing returns”.
Mapping the Delta wears its emotionalism lightly and
its beautiful images modestly. Best of all, it carries its sweet hope and garrulous humour with life-affirming pride; an important
corrective when so much else in the world seems dark and devastated.
