Rosie Johnston applauds the timeliness of Yvonne Greenâs challenging new collection
Honoured Yvonne Green Smith | Doorstop ISBN978-1-910367-56-8 ÂŁ9.95
Yvonne Green may be familiar to regular London Grip readers: her poem âThe Poetry of Propagandaâ appeared among this magazineâs new poetry in spring 2015; and her translation of Russian-Jewish poet Semyon Lipkinâs poetry (the Poetry Book Societyâs Translation Choice for winter 2011) was reviewed here in 2013. Her first pamphlet âBoukharaâ won the Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition in 2007 and her first full collection âThe Assayâ (2010) appeared in Hebrew in 2013 after she won translation funds from Lord Gavron and Celia Atkin. All are published by Smith Doorstop. Green is much in demand as a poet in residence, her positions including the JWA Womenâs Refuge, Norwood Ravenswood, Casa Shalom, Spiroâs Ark and The Global Foundation for the Elimination of Domestic Violence.
Green retired as a barrister in 1999 to concentrate on her poetry, and a sense of justice pervades her words. âHonouredâ falls into five sections with overarching themes of war, exile, survival and resettlement.
The first section âThis Is Not Your Historyâ leads us relatively gently to a world of Polish builders in London whose calloused hands embarrass / the families they try to build futures for. âMagic Carpetâ muses on how it used to take a whole family to make a Qum carpet by hand â childrenâs fingers are the most flexible â and on the tensions between that generation and the resettled next one:
What will you teach our children in exchange? With their pink fingers will they love any more? And how will they remember what our food was like after the hunger of a dayâs work?
Her second section âThat Kind Of Warâ takes us deeper into the impact of hostilities, one of the strongest being a revised version of âThe Poetry Of Propagandaâ (mentioned above). It starts with The sound of truth dying, / Death made holy and finishes with this jolt:
Transported away from themselves, theyâve learned to call their shadows enemy, to stand away from them. First to let other people kick them senseless, then to watch the terrified, use carvers, parers, nail-scissors, nappy-pins to open veins. Then there are those among them who bring out food, humanity, they are also guilty.
Likewise, Greenâs âWar Poemâ has a robust twist:
There are no heroic deaths in war, round people up, they cry like stuck pigs, run with a bayonet, you wet your pants, kill with a drone, computer games make you crazy when your kids play them. For evil not to triumph good people need do nothing but advocate, negotiate, react, be diplomatic, watchful, mindful
One of my favourite poems in the collection is âAkynâ, a clear, well-paced narrative about Stalinâs elimination of Ukrainian traditional poets and singers, based on Shostakovichâs memoir âTestimonyâ. An Akyn was an improvisational poet and singer among the Kazakh and Kirghic people who with other traditional poets and musicians became chaff to be mulched and limed invisible. Having lulled us with the trembled sinewed songs and musical names of those old instruments â kobza, basolya, lira, / sopilka, trembita, drymba â Green brings us up short with their fate:
They all came to Stalinâs âLife is Better, Life is Merrierâ conference. believed what they heard, in their unmapped villages. Gathered the dispersed, with their poems, music, history and they were shot.
Green tells in her fatherâs voice about his time spent in concentration camp in Aquitaine, south west France:
The gendarmes ran Gurs, thousands of us lay on the earth, in corrugated iron huts, open at both ends. Food, water and excrement came and went in the same buckets, and at 3 in the morning cattle-trucks rattled
Her father came here hooked to the side / of a Douglas Dakota after Paris was liberated, she says in a beautiful second-generation poem, âWelcome to Britainâ:
we were strangers when we came to where Iâd be born, go to grammar school, find language, literatures, history, geographies, to add to my own.
The section called âThink Of Herâ concentrates explicitly on the fates of women in wartime, yet Green finds hope in the resettled life:
Itâs Good To Love And marry a man of regular habits, a kind man. To have children, teach them to live by ancient rhythms, to question as they live in a different present, use old languages alongside the new. Itâs good to have your own realm near the one you came from, to build vision which splits light, makes surfaces on which all thatâs left of tears are tides of salt.
The section called âHonouredâ takes the feminist theme deeper into domestic violence, arranged marriage and the silencing of women across centuries in many societies.
The final section, âJewsâ, contains a splendid poem called âHendonistsâ, written âafterâ Sean OâBrienâs poem âNovembristsâ:
Itâs got to be written of us that we were happy, some in Brampton, some in Alexandra Road, some with Kosher Kingdom sushi, some fed by Gift, others still cooking their own kugel/hamim.
Here is Greenâs conversational style, a kind of folded-arms vernacular yet with every word earning its keep. This collection is not an easy ride but could not be more timely.
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Rosie Johnstonâs three poetry pamphlets are published by Lapwing Publications (Belfast), the latest Bittersweet Seventeens in March 2014. She also writes fiction and journalism, facilitates writing groups in London and Cambridge and is Poet in Residence for the Cambridgeshire Wildlife Trust. www.rosie-johnston.com
HONOURED by Yvonne Green â my review for London Grip
December 14, 2015 @ 11:09 am
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