Celebrating Survival

Content warning: child loss

In Agimat, Romalyn Ante’s speaker – which is presumably a version of herself – wrestles to claim love, beauty, and the ‘magic of words’ in the midst of harrowing circumstances: working as a nurse on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic, living through various traumas and miseries, and experiencing ordinary moments and interactions. The speaker tussles with language and its multiplicity of meanings in the poem ‘During the pandemic, I tell my lover I can no longer be a nurse, and he writes 言霊 on my arm’, wherein ‘The letters rearrange themselves’: ‘I am trying to leave this country / I am trying to love this country’.

The country that Ante’s speaker is trying to leave/love could be defined as the ‘country’ of the pandemic, the ‘country’ of key workers on the frontline, the ‘country’ of nursing under hazardous circumstances, the ‘country’ of stress and burnout, the ‘country’ of not being able to feel beauty, the ‘countries’ and heritages that battle against each other. None of these ‘countries’ are limited to a particular geography; they occupy a terrain that has been local, global, internal, and external for the speaker. One can liken them to an underworld of sorts: ‘I have sung all of the songs in the morgue’ Ante’s speaker mentions in the same poem. 

Of course, the term ‘country’ refers to actual nations as well, such as England – where many of the poems in the collection are based – and the Philippines, both of which Ante has called home. The folkloric and factual overlap. Mebuyan, mother of the underworld in the Filipino tradition and others, appears in several poems. As does Baybayin, ‘the language of [Ante’s] foremothers’, a ‘script colonisers tried to eradicate’. 

In the logic of Agimat, the magic in words is relied upon as an antidote, talisman, and protector. But sometimes the collection bristles and buckles under the stresses of copious imagery, languages, perspectives, and the attempt to pull them all together.

Structurally, Agimat has longer poems and sequences interspersed with shorter poems that have their titles in brackets and seem to be the author’s attempt to ‘find what beauty / is left in this quarantined town’ (‘Mebuyan and the Golden Boot’). These shorter poems often have tighter parameters and result in a more focused exploration:

[M45]

Earlier at the clinic,
a child told me he wanted to drink bleach;
certain he will never be healed.

Driving on a fog-smothered road,
I cry over the sudden blossoming
of snowflakes on my windshield.

The introspective tone of the shorter poems offers a counterbalance of stillness to the frenetic activity of the hospital and clinic. 

One of the most successful poems in the collection is ‘My father asks why I date a Japanese man’. Here we see Ante in full possession of her powers. The poem begins with the encounter, ‘We are stuck in traffic under the Selfridges Bridge’. Then the father’s gaze points the reader in the direction that we will travel next:

He stares beyond the windshield – at hectares
of rice fields he ploughed as a child. His steel
clanks against another steel – half-buried,
crusted mortar bomb dropped at a time
when every window was blown to embers
that children mistook for fireflies. 

The whole poem follows an overarching theme, which is essentially love in the context of Japanese occupation of the Philippines or love during a time of war, which bears tonal and emotional resemblances to love during a pandemic.

For me this was a collection that hadn’t quite found its way. On the one hand, this is a writer whose background, training as a nurse, and experience as a poet have equipped her to hold a variety of concepts, themes, images, and languages all at once. At the same time, in her poems, this holding of the multiple can feel unbalanced and forced. When there’s magic in this collection, it is in the imagery: ‘We insist on this hunger, / the way the glow-in-the-dark hands / of your watch penetrate the mist’ (‘[Rendezvous at West Park]’).

Charlotte Shevchenko Knight in her publication Food for the Dead shows the reader that hunger is another type of desire, and it has its own beauty: ‘hunger feels desperate & gorgeous / like kissing’ (‘a timeline of hunger’). The poems in this book are divided into four sections (‘бабусі – grandmothers’, ‘голод – ​hunger’, ‘жмур – corpse’, and ‘війни – war’) with two poems opening the collection. This is a book in which nothing feels extemporaneous or excessive. Shevchenko Knight honours the premises of the collection – lack, negation, family, food – and, accordingly, seems to have built her lyricism from the ground up. As the author mentions in ‘morning friend’:

we do not have the word for ‘lack’
we do not have words
only so much to be said
about absence without negating it […]

The repetition of ‘we do not have [the] word[s]’ reinforces their absence but also represents a hunger pang returning. This is a collection that not only honours absence but also writes with it and makes space for it, in and amongst the white space of the page. Perhaps there is also no need for the word ‘lack’ for the author because it forms such an integral part of her poetics and reason for writing.

One of the larger historical contexts for Food for the Dead is the Holodomor (meaning ‘death by hunger’ in Ukrainian), a human-made famine caused by Stalin’s regime in 1932–33. The poems also feel relevant to and implicate the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The women in this collection are the main focal points and seem especially affected, as seen in their efforts to feed themselves and their children, as well as the ways that hunger becomes an apparition haunting future generations:

           the guilty daughter whose collarbones
stick out like rusted nails     the granddaughter
who has grown up watching women starve for stalin
& in womanhood has picked the dirty habit up herself

As one would expect with a book that explores themes of hunger and famine, the author uses words like they have been rationed. Many of the poems have a quality of sparseness to them, even the longer sequenced ones. This economy of words is sometimes shown in the number of words to a line, other times in the number of lines or stanzas to a poem. One could say that the poetry is also pixelated: short like photographs but containing spaces and apertures within the text, as seen above in the space between ‘rusted nails’ and ‘the granddaughter’. 

Shevchenko Knight’s vision for the collection is clearly established from the beginning with  poems that show the connective tissue between family and food. The second poem in the book, ‘Generational Hazard’, is placed beside a photo of the author’s multigenerational family taken before she was born:

the women of my family
are sepia and crackling
they are climbing
an oak
with babies
in one arm
grasping branches
with the other
recreating
the family tree

It is a moment of playfulness within the collection that also echoes the work that the author does with her book, recreating the family tree and the larger historical contexts. The author’s recreation is not without ethical considerations. In the epigraph to ‘poetry feeds the soul’, Shevchenko Knight quotes Hera Lindsay Bird: ‘O I feel sorry for the people I love and / where it is I am taking them’, and in the following poem ‘sonnet on ethics’ on the adjacent page the text reads: ‘no one asks the dead permission to allegorise / their bodies     magpie their childhoods // make of them a song     a nest      of bones’.

The logic of the collection is ‘hot / to the touch’ (‘food for the dead’) and laser-focused, from the level of diction to the spaces between words, to the precisely named sections, and how everything is working together to create an experience of hunger as desire. The themes and ideas seem to organically overlap and intersect. And there’s much to celebrate here: 

lately i’ve taken up prayer
cutting store-bought heirlooms
into ripe smiles
as a means of thanking god
that he couldn’t deny babusya
her bright red want.
                    (‘heirloom tomatoes’)

Poems like ‘happy violence’ depict a time when the speaker’s life is like ‘a beautiful 30-second advert’, and ‘babusya’s heart was cold’ details an orange peel placed on the radiator as a remedy, its scent permeating the room. Those poems and others create a subtle undercurrent of celebrating survival that adds further dimension to the poems and elevates the mood of the collection as a whole.

Stylistically, Joyelle McSweeney’s Death Styles lands somewhere between Agimat, in terms of its experimentation, and Food for the Dead, in terms of its focus. In a talk called ‘Use this Word in a Sentence, “Experimental”’, Ann Lauterbach defined the term by stating: ‘The two words, “experience” and “experiment” share an etymological root; they are the flora of experiri, to try, and related to periculum, which includes the ideas of both attempt and peril.’ This sense of trying, peril, and experience succinctly describes the mode through which McSweeney’s text was written. 

The poem sequence ‘Death Styles’, from which the collection takes its name and which forms most of the book, started as a response to the death of McSweeney’s infant daughter, and became a practice for survival and a container for grief. In the afterword, McSweeney writes of the process:

I set myself three rules. First, I had to write daily. Second, I had to accept any inspiration presented to me as an artifact of the present tense, however incidental, embarrassing or fleeting (these are identified as the subtitles for the poems). Third, I had to fully follow the flight of that inspiration for as far as it would take me. 

That forward propulsion, which was a requirement of this writing style, is usually at odds with the impetus of mourning, which is to look backwards and to stop time. Regarding this tension, McSweeney mentions: ‘After we lost our daughter, I wanted time to not just stop, but to repeat. Even if I couldn’t have a different ending, I wanted to have those thirteen days with her again. I was caught in a problem impossible to solve.’

And the poems seem to cater, at least partially, to both needs: the work of propelling the author’s attention forward in time and also cycling back. Language becomes a river where themes and moments surface, take shape, sink back to the watery depths, and then resurface as the poem and collection progress:

River I’m trying to see around you
to an idea of art
that’s both pit and tower
dick and uterus at once
inside the blood can splash, replenish
and shed all over again. 
                    (‘Conclusive Death Style: A Katabasis for River Phoenix’)

The author challenges ‘art’ and specifically poetry to hold everything that she brings to it and places upon it, both presence and absence, waxing and waning, like the ebb and flow of a menstrual cycle. While reading Death Styles, I didn’t feel as though McSweeney had invented a poetic form with these poems so much as a poetic practice. 

The reader does receive more fragmentary details of the author’s loss on different days of this poetic journaling. Interestingly, reading through the collection doesn’t feel like being pulled through an underworld of mourning, perhaps because even when the poem doubles back on itself sonically with the repetition of vowel sounds or through rhyme, there always seems to be a momentum propelling the poem beyond any traumatic sticking points: 

a distended abdomen
a nudge and wink
a little half grin
and a little flexing arm
all signs of infant seizure
but only in one picture
can you see her mouth make
that shape that makes me shake
and I’ve deleted that photo anyway
I’ve deleted that photon
shoved it right back up the gut
of the cosmos that made it
and sent it shooting out across universe
going the wrong way
– you’re going the wrong way!
                    (‘8.11.20, A Skunk’)

This poem and almost all of the pieces in the ‘Death Styles’ sequence are double spaced, which gives the impression of them floating or hovering in mid-air. The poems aren’t so much going towards a known destination – beyond following the author’s three rules – as the lines are avoiding a descent into disorder, brokenness, and chaos: ‘in your sleep you repeat the motion / of advancing, retracting’ (‘9.2.20, A Daughter’s Style’). The experiment in language and experience remains interesting, playful, and surprising throughout.