The Poems Are Dusted With Gems
In a recent Grain issue (Vol. 37.1) Myrna Kostash writing about George Ryga remarks on his “indissoluble kinship with the dispossessed.” Writing from a place of social activism is the tradition from which the inventive chapbook by Katharine Beeman draws. A Swamp and Forest Inlander Meets the Sea focuses on Cuba and aligns itself immediately with Fidel Castro and the rebels who fought with him. The poet has a mission statement in her introduction, seeing her book as “a wavelet in the gathering world wide tsunami to wash the [U.S.] blockade from the Island’s shores.” The metaphor of a wavelet is apt. Beeman describes both her personal and political love affair with Cuba in liquid language. The personal love poems are linked by images of water and the sea. In “My Cuban Skin” she is “a fish…a brown trout/hanging in the current.” And in “Yearning in a different language” love in Cuba is an ocean-side affair: “my thirst to explore/ the blue sea, your eyes…your brown skin/the sand/ I stretch/ myself upon.” The title poem continues this ocean-side metaphor with the sometimes disconcerting, washed-up-on-the-beach experience of translating another culture: “Twenty-eight rivers rise into the sea/shift shaping shape changing,/who knows if it’s only one/ whose touch/calls you back,/or all,/ who knows/where you/may land/unsuspected/ on a stormy night.”
The language is hospitable, though some poems could have used a heavier editing hand on the adjectives, and with line break choices. Nonetheless, the poems are dusted with gems such as “tongues whose talk changes day to day” to describe the way the sea shapes sand, and “your limbs thin with yearning” in “Quixote.” The poet plays with translation—both literal from the Spanish, and metaphoric in the sympathetic rendering of and the desire to connect.
The more political poems come in the second half of the chapbook, where the poet picks up on the repetitive quality of the introductory chant “From between turtle and raven.” In poems such as “My mother and Che Guevara” we see some of the influences that have shaped the poet’s commitment to social justice. This poem equates the mother who works from her living room to end apartheid with the famous fighter and plays with the notion that time/ gender/ race do not separate like souls: they appear at different junctures of history and perform at different volumes, but the valuable work remains the same. While I enjoyed the ideas of many of the poems in this section, I also felt a weakness: Some poems teeter uneasily on that tricky balance between political advocacy and poetry. I applaud Beeman’s commitment and her attempts to educate her reader—the book is filled with footnotes and translations—but without that sense of poetic exploration, some of the poems lack surprise. Having said this, I was moved by these poems honouring the honourable, especially “Shield and leaf” which is footnoted and describes how “in the wars of independence Cuban women carried yagruma leaves in their bouquets, deceiving Spanish soldiers with the dark side hiding rebel messages written on the light side.” This passionate book, as the final poem “Quiver” attests, succeeds as a voice of light shot into “the black imperial heart”.
I asked Katharine Beeman to choose a poem she considered representational of the heart of the book and she chose “Bonsai inmenso/Great Bonsai.”
In the Poet’s Words: I would choose “Bonsai inmenso/Great bonsai.” First of all because hopefully the seeming contradiction makes the reader/listener sit up and pay attention right away.
And there’s lots of seeming contradictions, dissonances, in the book – swamp-sea, love-struggle, Cuba-First Nations, nature-human history. But its resonance, the ripples its words set off, is the web of interconnectedness at the heart of the book: Here on Pacha Mama (Mother Nature) we are linked in mutual responsibility, for her, each other, ourselves, and this is a possible and celebratory task. The art of bonsai, after all, is to listen to the tree and help it become its best self.
Bonsai inmenso
Great bonsai
Escusha, mi amor,
Listen, my love,
escucha cerca, mi amor
Listen close, my love,
escucha mis chispas cuchicheando
listen to my whispers sparking
allá sembraron mis semillas y
allá bajaron mis raices,
over there, they planted my seeds
over there my roots descended
ahí crecio mi tronco
my trunk grew there
pero aquí florecen mis ramos y mis hojas.
but my branches and leaves flourish here.
Y acércate ya, mi amor y oye,
come closer yet, my love and hear
oye, aquí crecen mis rocas.
here, my rocks grow.
