Review
The Winter Orchards, Nina Bogin, Anvil £7.95
Nina Bogin’s poems seem to emerge from a terrible silence, the silence of annihilation or possible annihilation. And yet, reading them, the word terrible takes on a new meaning, as it is connected with tenderness and comfort, so annihilation could almost be a chosen quietness, a sitting quietly after the larger action has passed. In ‘Vladivostok’, a poem about the end of Osip Mandelstam’s life, she offers us couplets that replace one thing with another:
you traded the coat
for a blanket
the blanket
for a poem
the words for a fever
that rose up like memory
and hovered in the numb air
over the scraps fires
until night cleared a place for you
in its black
- where the adjective “black”, used as a noun, carries a sense of benediction that doesn’t deny the tragedy of his last days, but somehow blesses them.
‘Bird’ accords a linked significance to the death of a chaffinch:
The rain began. I walked past the new
graveyard
and the old one, the two churches, the
supermarket,
the drugstore, the bank, and all this time
the hand that had held the little bird
was strange and gentle,
different from the other.
and this poem is next to ‘To Think of You’, poem celebrating the life of a girl who died when she was thirteen. ‘The Stillborn’, likewise, addresses the lives of those who have, in the ordinary way, never lived, and it’s this poem, I think, that I find the most arresting in the collection, because, again, it causes me to see something in a different way:
They have nothing in common with death.
No, it’s as if a path
had been traced for them across a clean beach
with footprints ready for them to fall into step,
to walk into the dazzling wind of their lives.
And when they turned back,
remained crustacean,
slowly the footprints unmade themselves
each grain of sand, one after the other,
tumbled back into the sea.
Nina Bogin knows about what Tony Harrison called “the silence round all poetry”. She has inherited the gift of mindful speech bequeathed by Denise Levertov and, in a noisy world where most of us speak and write too quickly, she is a lesson and a delight.
Page(s) 61-62
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