Christine Marendon's Heroines from Abroad, translated by Ken Cockburn, is a revealing collection that reminds us that the power of poetry isn't limited to the words. The feeling that overcomes you when reading the poems is numinous; they take you out of your home and into the forest at sunset, or by a tunnel at 4am, and make you distinctly aware of your place on the planet.
and still waits for the new age.
In Breath, a human becomes 'a missing feather' which belongs to a bird that is illuminated 'so bright' it becomes 'a comet'. In Papyrus, humanity becomes mycelium who lack the need for sunlight like typical plants, but who we create forest floors with nonetheless.
Marendon wants us to appreciate our differences, but acknowledge the differences anyway. While plants are described with siblilance, alliteration and soft plosive consonance, humans are restricted to sharper aspects of speech with harsh plosive k's and t's. Despite this positioning, the entire stanza together is made up of the same base language, in the original German or the translated English, and that's exactly the point; however different aesthetically or phonetically, we're still made up of the same root. This semantic field of the intermingling of plants and people throughout the collection harks back to a pagan sense of belonging to the earth as one part of a growing, multifaceted, web of nature.
back to his feet. We departed with the stones.
whilst in 'Stellaria', prayers become obscure pieces of metal that have the potential to be ' a rifle//or an astronomical telescope' if only they knew how to fit them together correctly. In 'Rotunda', a handshake leaves the narrator 'kneeling// to the saints of motorway slip-roads and// service-stations'. The juxtaposition of concrete concepts of human constructs like tunnels, guns, and motorways, with more abstract notions of prayer, religion, and dreaming encapsulates exactly what makes up the human experience; the tangibly real, and that which becomes real through faith and belief.
Marendon's collection is an exacting evaluation of the human species, that weaves didactic lessons of 'remember where you come from, and what you really are' throughout. Heroines from Abroad encourages us to open our eyes to the limits of ourselves, and to acknowledge the power and the presence of nature in our lives. She encourages us to accept the dark parts, embrace the lighter parts, and live in the place where the pair meet. This collection is beautiful and intense, and while you come out from the final page with a head full of questions, you also leave with a heart full of connectedness to the world around you, and a brain open to the possibility of opening a window once in a while, and finally watering your succulents.