I have a thing for Wisława Szymborska. There’s something about her clarity and the way she stands to the side of other poets, chalking a space on the sidewalk that’s just enough for her where she can be herself. So when I was offered the chance to read an advance copy of The Acrobat: Essential Poems, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak, I leapt at it.

While most of the poems in this volume exist in others I have on my shelf (and I was disappointed the poems appeared only in English), this slim volume presents a voice of its own that I will happily hold onto because of the way the selected poems play against each other to reveal things I haven’t seen in the work before. The book also contains Szymborksa’s Nobel speech, which is poetry in and of itself. This is a great book for readers who are new to Szymborska or for those who want to take a fresh look at poems (and a poet) they thought they knew.

Ars Poetica

It’s sometimes hard not to write about the art of writing when you’re creating a poem or essay, and I really appreciated the way this collection started with “The Acrobat.” While there isn’t any explicit mention of writing in this piece (except the word “plots”), I couldn’t help but read it against Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Constantly risking absurdity,” where he writes “the poet like an acrobat,” a line that defined for me what poets even do long before I thought I could ever write it.

Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind (from which this poem originates) is from 1958 and Szymborska’s No End of Fun (which contains “The Acrobat”) was published in 1967. I have no way of knowing if she ever read his work, but it did make me like this poem all the more. And, in that light, lines like these make me like the art of writing even more, too:

how he plots from head to toe
against his very being; do you know, do you see
how cunningly he weaves himself through his own
     former shape
and works to seize this swaying world
by stretching out the arms he has conceived —

– from “The Acrobat” by Wisława Szymborska

Quiet Contradictions

The best poets understand the energy that can be created in the friction of contradiction. Szymborska is a master of this, from “the unthinkable / can be thought” in “Miracle Fair” to “It could have happened. / It had to happen. / It happened earlier. Later.” in “Could Have.” This is one of the places in the book where the energy of these two poems beside each other revealed more to me than I’d seen when they were presented in separate collections.

What I love about the way Szymborska is using this energy is the quiet resoluteness of it. There’s nothing flashy about any of the lines above. No hyperbole, no large words. Just inherent opposites that must, nevertheless, exist in the same space. From my time in Poland, this strikes me as inherently Polish (perhaps in response to Soviet repression): the acknowledging of ideas and experiences that may contradict what you yourself experienced but refusing in your heart, to yield your own worldview. And it’s powerful.

Embodiment

Reading this collection, I kept thinking about how Szymborska returns again and again to the simple yet universal experience of the body. In “Tortures” and “One Version of Events,” she writes about this explicitly, but the body as absence is equally insistent in “Cat in an Empty Apartment.” The way she focuses attention on our objects in poems like “Still Life with a Balloon” also calls to mind the way our bodies interact with these things. This is all, in a way, an insistence on seeing our humanness. A reminder that’s very necessary at the moment, and one she captures most eloquently in “The End and the Beginning” (a favorite of mine):

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
– from “The End and the Beginning” by Wisława Szymborska

Translating Sound

I thought about Cavanagh’s introduction with specifics about how she and Barańczak tried to capture the spirit of the poems when I read “Birthday” and the line “Chinchillas, gorillas, and sarsaparillas.” This was the poem where I most wanted to see the Polish against the English because I think serious liberties were taken and that only because of that jump could the translation have become as artful as the original. I even got to use this as an example in a poetry class when we were discussing what Mary Oliver meant when she wrote “poems are not language but the content of the language” in A Poetry Handbook.

When Szymborska laments in “Poetry Reading” the size of a poet’s audience versus the “teeming crowds” of a boxing match, I couldn’t help but think that poets win in the longevity department, especially poets with a strong, clear voice like Szymborska, a woman who understood that any work “becomes one continuous adventure as long as [we] manage to keep discovering new challenges in it” and dug into writing poems until she found the very essence of what makes us human.

The Acrobat was released earlier this month. If you use this link to pick up a copy at Bookshop.org, I receive a commission.

I grew up aspiring to a “classical education” where I would read all the tomes of great thinkers from the Greek poets to the French Enlightenment, in their original languages of course. I didn’t achieve this (not only because I failed at teaching myself Latin) and my ambitions have changed. To be clear, I think versing yourself in these books is a wonderful way to exercise your mind and engage in western traditions. But as I grew and came to see what was missing from those stories—me. It’s been reported that only 0.5% of history is about women’s stories, which is why I’m loving the more contemporary retellings of classic stories from the point of view of women in books like I Am Cleopatra, Fates and Furies, and She Never Told Me About the Ocean. Medea is hardly an ignored character in literature, but the upcoming publication of No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes coincides perfectly with my hunger to learn more about the past without feeling erased by it.

From One Voice to Many

I’m well acquainted with the choral narration of some Greek stories—it’s actually something I’m using in Naked Driving to the Witches’ Graveyard, the book I’m finishing up right now—but telling Medea’s story from within an anonymous mass of voices would defeat the point. Instead, she provides myriad individual voices in No Friend to This House. The story is almost entirely told from the alternating points of view of women, including Alcimede, Aphrodite, Hypsiple, Hera, Glauke, and, of course, Medea.

What this means is that we see the events of the book almost entirely through the eyes of these women. Which is a switch, for sure. We see the power of the goddesses in lines like, “The men’s impossible quest would become possible once they had Artemis’ advice.”

We also see how live continued outside the heroic quests: “So the women did as they always did when their menfolk were away: tended to their homes, their children, their livestock, and tried not to think about the spears and arrows of the Thracians piercing their beloved flesh.” We see possibilities where the women cope so well that the men might not be welcome home at all if they misbehave, as is the case with the Lemnians. And we are inside the conspiracy between these wronged women and the Thracian slave women their husbands tried to replace them with.

The Power of Perspective

Most of these are told in third person, but some (including Kleite, Erato, Chalciope, and Medea) burst into the narrative with a first person perspective. This is sometimes jarring, but it allows for characters like Kleite to speak for themselves for once.

“Did you just try to miss out on my part of the story? Why? No, don’t tell me, I already know the answer. It’s because no one remembers my name. That’s right, I’m just glossed over every time.” Kleite, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes

I appreciated the sentiments of these interjections, but the forcefulness of the shift sometimes made them feel like they were serving the conceit of the book more than the narrative itself (even if I was glad to have the stories they contained). There are others, though, where this intimacy with even minor characters offered a poignancy that would otherwise be missed, as in the testimony of Theophane mother of Chrysomallos (the sheep with the golden fleece):

“So they killed him, they cut his skin from his warm body, and they kept it as a trophy. No one thinks it matters because he was only an animal and they are nothing. And no one thinks I matter because I am nothing too. Just the mother of a miracle that men chose to see as a thing.” – Theophane, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes

It’s Medea’s narration where this first person perspective feels most essential. Because she doesn’t enter the book until the correct chronological place, it’s easy (especially if you’re as rusty on this story as I am) to forget how important she is.

“I’m aware that this is how I’ve been portrayed by many people. You will no doubt pride yourself on your independence of mind, and believe that the impressions you have of me, the conclusions you have reached about me are all your own. You are astute, observant, analytical. You couldn’t have your assumptions swayed by prejudice.” – Medea, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes

It’s not an understatement to say that this direct access to Medea’s thoughts are critical to the success of the book.

Feminism Writ Large

Unpacking and challenging old ideas is difficult. They are deeply ingrained and also so many people are at so many different stages of learning. This is what made Lessons in Chemistry appeal to so many women of my mother’s generation and yet appear quaint to women of mine. This means that some of the lines ring very true to me and what I’ve seen women experience, like this from Medea near the end of the book:

“I needed to be clever but not too clever, to fit in but not too well, to be popular but not more than him, to be Greek but never Greek enough, to be his wife but still out of reach. I believed I could change and adapt sufficiently to hold him, and it never occurred to me that this would not—could not—be enough.” – Medea, No Friend to This House by Natalie Haynes

And others, as when the Peliades describe Medea as “sweet as honey dripping from the comb…None of us could believe it, when we found out who she was and what she’d done,” that set up an enmity between the women that made me uncomfortable. This enmity makes a certain sense given the cultural divisions, but there was also a current of androcentric jealousy that I wish we could move beyond.

All of this to say that I enjoyed the story of this book and the way it made me think.

If you are interested in exploring Greek myths from a gynocentric angle pre-order a copy of No Friend to This House from Bookshop.org before it’s released on March 10. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

It feels like a natural day to reflect on silence as my husband is on a field trip with our son and I have the whole house (and garden!) to myself. It’s just me and the distant sirens on this hermitage (oh, the joys of opening the windows on a summery day). But I’ve been thinking about silence and the things we say and don’t say ever since I read Pico Iyer’s Aflame, followed quickly by The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk.

Peaceful Reflection in Aflame: Learning from Silence

Maybe I’m always thinking about silence. That’s part of the reason why I put Aflame on my Christmas, birthday, and Mother’s Day wish lists. Of course I love Pico Iyer’s work and worldview, and I’ve been re-exploring Buddhism in this time of reconsidering after I left my job. That last bit is why this book felt so necessary for me right now—the book being not just about one retreat Iyer took, but instead touching on the hundreds of retreats he’s taken throughout his life.

“The new Pope [Francis] prayed, I read, not for an answer to any problem, but only for the courage to live with the unanswerable.” – Pico Iyer, Aflame

Iyer writes of how this annual ritual, coupled with one he undertakes in Japan in a different season, enriches his life. He describes that at the hermitage, “Nothing feels forbidden here because there’s no one I’m supposed to be.” A feeling I can relate to in this silent afternoon. It’s hard to make the most of it, because, as a monk relates to Iyer, “We bring [stress, acceleration, dividedness] with us… And sometimes it can be more intense here because it’s more internal.” In truth, I’ve felt myself puttering around today, looking for something to do, wondering what it even is that I want to do or even eat. I know from writing retreats, though, that this feeling passes when I give myself the time to stop worrying into it. As another monk that Iyer quotes says, “[P]eople need the silence to hear themselves.”

What made me want to write about this book, though, is the spareness with which Iyer details his experiences. It’s a stylistic choice, and one that leaves the reader open to insert their own experiences, worries, and meditations into the space. It can also feel odd at times, like when Iyer writes of a songwriter friend. He mentions some lyrics that sound vaguely familiar, but leaves off naming Leonard Cohen for quite some time. This technique effectively focuses the reader (at least one with a poor memory) on what they are discussing rather than the blam, in-the-face fame moment, which I appreciate. But the name drop still slapped me when it occurred and I found myself wondering if Iyer had argued with his editor about even including it, because the book is rich and relatable enough on its own.

Reading this book is itself a meditation. While I miss taking writing retreats (I will again, someday, when I figure out how a better balance between earning and making), just spending time leafing through this book helped me deepen my sense of peace and understanding of the world. Which helped me remember also that there is joy in engaging with it.

“The Buddha’s lesson, too, excessive renunciation is still excess.” – Pico Iyer, Aflame.

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud in The Empusium

I have also loved Tokarczuk’s work before, though The Books of Jacob was a bit much for me. So I opened The Empusium thinking only that I was ready for whatever ride she wanted to take me on. I was not prepared for how closely this book mirrors The Magic Mountain, nor was I prepared for how effectively she was going to use a profluence of words against the characters who are speaking them.

The Empusium is, in that way, the exact opposite of Aflame, because it’s only by filling in an excess of detail that Tokarczuk can show us what we’ve been failing to see all along. The book follows Mieczysław Wojnicz as he travels to a health resort to be cured of “various conditions best understood not by him but by his father.” Which, I understood from reading more of the book, was a deep shot not just at Wojnicz the elder as patriarch but at the Patriarchy in general.

This book cleverly turns the Patriarchy flat on its head in many ways, but the one I most wanted to share with you today is how Tokarczuk fills the mouths of the men around Mieczysław with the words and ideas of many great thinkers throughout history.

• “In the philosophical sense we cannot treat a woman as a comprehensive, complete subject of the kind that man is.”
• “A woman should have her rights, of course, but she should never forget that she belongs to society, which appoints the institution of the state to take care of its interests, so to but it logically, a woman, hm, hm, can be commanded by the state.”
• “Women…are incapable of creating a national organization, or even a tribal one, because by their nature they submit to those who are stronger.

Unfortunately, we live in a time when not all audiences would read these ideas as outdated. Some would, alas, celebrate the misogyny. The beauty of what Tokarczuk has done, though, is allowing people to read those characters however they choose, piling (to me) uncomfortable statement on top of uncomfortable statement and then smacking anyone who is confused on where her moral center lies with an author’s note at the end:

“All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors: Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Cluny, William S. Burroughs, Cato, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin…[and so on to include 30 additional fathers of knowledge]” – Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium

There are other, subtler ways she plays with masculine and feminine roles and stereotypes in this book. There are also less subtle things involving copulating with holes in the ground. It’s a masterful and darkly funny book, one that’s direly needed in the now. If only we could get people to read it…

I’m off to hang out in the hammock with Gary Shteyngart as he skewers the 1% class… May your weekend be filled with the kinds of silence you most love.

“‘Everything will be all right in the end,’ says Cyprian, steering the car away from the precipice. ‘I fully believe that. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.'” – Pico Iyer, Aflame

If you need a meditation or a wake-up call, pick up a copy of Aflame: Learning from Silence or The Empusium from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

After my lowest weeks, days I spilled over into tears at the slightest provocation, I started to think I might have cabin fever. I may have researched winter-over syndrome, wondering if there was something clinical. I’ve definitely read this article about the pandemic wall more than once. Recently, though, I realized that I’m profoundly bored and that I’m using the fitty energy of that to gnaw at my leg and any other thing I can reach. This whatever feeling has also explained my reading tastes of late—I’m reading almost entirely nonfiction, a category I mostly avoid, except, perhaps, when I’m trying to experience something that feels more like life than this routine we’ve developed to get through the thing. I should say that we’re well, financially stable, and okay in general. But humans weren’t designed to live a full year mostly indoors and away from other humans. Screens aren’t helping. So I thought I’d share some of the lives I’ve been living lately in case you need your own escape.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich

This polyphonic history of post-Soviet Russia is fascinating. It’s fascinating as events unfold with Navalny in Russia. It’s fascinating as the U.S. seems intent on forgetting our own attempted coup. It’s fascinating in general to remember what it was like to live through the fall of the Soviet Union and the clashes and shifts in that country in the years following. It’s also fascinating for me as someone who’s always been interested in the Eastern European parts of my heritage.

Alexievich includes first-person narratives of everyone from dedicated sovoks to capitalist dreamers, from oppressed minorities to people who lived The Gulag Archipelago, and this book helped me realize how rich and complex the post-Soviet experience is. At times it made me feel better about the political situation in the U.S. At times it did not. Because of the failure of our Congress to hold Trump accountable for trying to kill them and their colleagues, I’ll leave you with this quote from someone who was part of massive anti-Lukashenko protests in Belarus in 2010:

“As long as it’s only us educated romatics out in the streets, it’s not a real revolution.” – Tanya Kuleshova as reported to Svetlana Alexievich

Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia by Suzanne Massie

My Russian deep-dive may have started with an attempt to finally get this tome off my to-read shelf before the opening the stack of books awaiting me for my birthday. It might also have started because I was remembering my Djiedo, who died about two years ago. Regardless, Land of the Firebird was fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like this cultural history. While it’s easy to be skeptical about any book about Russia published in America in the 1980’s, it’s clear that Massie loves the country of her ancestors and the book is filled with fascinating information.

Massie takes us through the history of early Russia where I learned that the Ukrainians and Russians used to be one people (which flipped some of my Reagan-era prejudices on their head). The early parts of the book are more history as she details Mongol invasions and other political transformations and I enjoyed reading about Catherine the Great after having watched The Great. In more recent history, though, Massie really goes beyond history and deep into the culture and arts of Russia (ending at the revolution). I took so much from this book as I forced my son to sit through Russian composers I’d never considered and started more than one poem tracing lines through the artistic side of my Ukrainian heritage. It’s a nice book, but one I’ve already found occasion to share with another writer online.

The Face Series: Tash Aw, Chris Abani and Ruth Ozeki

I was thrilled when I found this gem in a local Little Free Library one day this past fall, because Ozeki and Abani are two of my very favorite writers. I was also excited to delve into the very personal stories in the book as I work to learn more about individual experiences of race.

True to form, Ozeki’s meditation on her literal face is as inventive, intelligent and humorous as the rest of her books. Her Buddhist perspective is always fascinating and humbling, and I loved how she interspliced mini essays on her life with the minute-by-minute observations of staring at her face in the mirror.

“Making familiar things strange is the job of the artist.” – Ruth Ozeki, The Face

Abani’s book contains his characteristic humanity, gorgeous writing, and knowing humor. His look at identity weaves us through stories of his life, conversations with his brother, and greater lessons about Western African culture. This book is one step in the trail of love he leaves wherever he goes.

I did not previously know Aw’s work, but now I can’t wait to read more of it. He belongs among Pico Iyer’s global souls and this book takes us on a fascinating journey through what it is like for him as a Malaysian writer who both does and does not blend into a variety of cultures throughout Asia. Despite having traveled in several Asian countries, I learned so much about different experiences of the continent from the nuances of this book.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t really do any of these three (short but rich) books justice here, because so much of the beauty is in discovering the way these three writers structure their thoughts. What I can do is highly recommend each and every one.

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller

This book is actually fiction based on stories from someone who experienced the same deportation to the gulag. I’ve lost the book somewhere (or given it away, it was oh so very depressing), so I cannot treat you to any of Müller’s sentences or the fantastic imagery she imbues into this bleak, bleak experience, but this book is one of the most beautifully written things I’ve read in a very long while and it will make almost any pandemic experience seem cheery.

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

Now we’re snowed in for the long weekend, and after finally finishing the Alexievich book (so good, so long, such small print), I decided to treat myself to Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. I’m not very far along, but already it’s a bit like reading Simone Weil (which I loved). Because I’m a reluctant agnostic (and most of the time Buddhist), I do not resonate deeply with Merton’s relationship with God, and still I connect deeply with the content of his writing. When he writes of Descartes as a being alienated from his feelings, “in exile from his own spiritual depths,” I recognize a struggle I’ve been working to overcome for the last decade as I integrate my thoughts and my feelings.

In January 2020, I had come to the conclusion that I needed to focus on being more mindful of my everyday experiences, their effects on me, and my relationship with the world at large. Which lasted until about February, when the only thing I was able to be mindful of was my need to stock up on basic supplies and the fear I was beginning to feel every time my son went to daycare. A year later, I feel stable enough (despite the pandemic wall) to breathe and think. And I’m excited to have Merton as my guide on the next step of whatever is to come.

Of course, this nonfiction fixation started before I realized it and most of my last pandemic reading list qualifies. May these (or any other) books bring you some comfort until we get to live our own lives again.