Review of Velvel’s Violin, by Jacqueline Saphra, pub. Nine Arches 2023
We did not want enough
to do the merciful thing. - “Mercy”
The poet has remarked that this themed collection “is about our common humanity”. That is true, inasmuch as all human suffering touches all humans. And there are near-explicit references to contemporary events, like the proposal to export refugees to Rwanda, glanced at in “Madagascar”. But the collection is very much written from the viewpoint of the particular, Jewish, group of humans whose history is hers, and who certainly have a great deal of human suffering to draw on. “Mercy”, the poem quoted above, is one of the few that is from a more general viewpoint and is indeed about the suffering of a bird rather than a human. And in some ways it’s an odd one, because the “merciful thing” that the crowd of anonymous people cannot bring themselves to do would, in this case, be to kill the bird, which is too injured to live. It would be somewhat alarming to see this as a direct analogy for the human condition, but I think the point is that “mercy” is not always easy and that we often, like this crowd, continue on our way rather than get involved.
In the poem “Jew”, the main speaker lists a mélange of facts, slanders, myths, cliches, symbols - “the Nobel and the intellect, the where, where, not here, diaspora, the klezmer, mazeltov, the shabbos bride, the candlestick, the yiddishkeit, the pogrom” - while a subsidiary voice keeps interjecting with comments like “don’t dwell on that again” and “no no, move on, move on”. Since this voice is in italics, it could well be the internal voice of the poem’s speaker, anxious as to how it will come over. But it echoes the spoken and unspoken response that accounts of suffering often generate, especially from those who have been either responsible or complicit in it. Those who have come out on the “winning” side of any conflict routinely want the losers or sufferers to “move on” and forget their resentment; we see the same response in many situations, vindicating the poet’s claim to universality. In a much less extreme example, the recent anniversary of the miners’ strike led some to protest to the BBC that rather than watch programmes about it, we should all “move on”, in reply to which an ex-miner pointed out that he was in effect being asked to move on from his own history.
Saphra is eloquent on the impossibility of this in “The Trains, Again”:
again the trains, it is this friend whose mother told her
That is the tree, that is the tree
- as she chopped the onions, stirred the soup
bleached the bleachable, celebrated the spring:
When they come for us, I will hang myself from that tree.
When will they come for us, my friend?
Can you hear the trains? I hear them
in my sleep, rattling continents, heaving
and breathing along the tracks of my veins
riding my blood. There is no silencing them.
I tend to think of Saphra as a form poet, and though there is more free verse here than I generally associate with her, there are also sonnets, a ghazal and, in several poems that look at first sight like unrhymed couplets, subtle patterns of rhyme, half-rhyme and assonance lurking under the surface, eg in “Poland, 1885”, where the rhymes and near-rhymes cross the couplet breaks:
a past I sought long overgrown
the state of currency still volatile
human traces vague, all guesses wild.
Nothing left to find; nothing and no-one.
But oh, the language: soft-tongued
apologetic; those legends of tracks
pointing towards infinity; haystacks,
horse-drawn carts; disappearing villages
There’s no denying that, like all themed collections, this does harp a lot on one string, which is not everyone’s fancy in a collection. But towards the end, there is a note of redemption being sounded. It seems, in “20264” and “The News and the Blackbird”, to be intimately connected to birth and motherhood, and the second of these poems is particularly noticeable for the return of the bird motif, this time in a happier context. The blackbird “will not stop her song” and, when the narrator is obsessed with war the bird bursts out “suddenly in the key/of joy Look out! Look up! The stress on the bird’s femaleness is interesting; female blackbirds sing far less than males, more quietly and only in the breeding season. This one has a “chick-heavy” nest, the presumable cause of her outburst of joy. There is a parallel here with another recent collection I’ve lately read, Nora Nadjarian’s “Iktsuarpok”, which also has a background in war (Cyprus) and persecution (the Armenian genocide) and which also sees redemption and joy in human, particularly parental, relationships. Indeed the ghazal mentioned earlier, “Before the War”, is addressed to Nadjarian, and wryly encapsulates the universal, ongoing human condition of which both poets speak:
Now truth drags out its death drawl: ‘To which current war do you refer?’
We live in the dark of that question: no such era as ‘before the war’.