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Flood Warning

THE BEAUTY of any poetry pamphlet lies in its tantalising brevity. A good pamphlet will whet the reader’s appetite for the full collection. Berta Freistadt’s Flood Warning does just that. Some of these poems have appeared in magazines and journals and a handful of earlier versions were published in the anthology Dancing the Tightrope (Women’s Press, 1987).

   It is always heartening to witness a poet’s work growing from a few poems to a larger crop, and the 23 poems in Flood Warning suggest that this is only a segment of a much longer journey.

   The first part of the pamphlet charts the ebb and flow of relationships between women. These intimate poems are best read at night in a half-lit room. The second half consists of two long poems: “Israel in Kilburn” and “The Questions of Maps.” These poems are starker and question the poet’s identity across many borders: cultural, racial, and biblical. The text of the poetry marks out a new geography. “Israel in Kilburn” moves through the unstable sites of memory and the history of an ongoing conflict. The voice strives to make sense of a plural identity located in the present tense.

My head is full of broken gravestones
graffiti in Bradford in Stamford Hill
of the subtleties of the Israeli accent
like my Mogen Dovid for the most part
hidden. No words for this passing.

   The poem highlights the personal and political risks faced by any poet responding to war, and the limitations and failure of language.

My head is full of nouns and verbs
die, sea, throw, be and adverbs
bitterly and strongly. Why
an adverb of interrogation
the bloody adjectives right and wrong
(“Israel in Kilburn”)

   By contrast the poems in the first part of the pamphlet are openings to dreamscapes, they have one foot in the air and the other in water. The imagery trickles under lines, creating a watery lyrical web. Female energies and sexuality are explored and dressed in many guises:

I went to hear the great
one-breasted Goddess sing
but though fire
smoked around her ankles
she did not play for me
(“The Event”)

   Elsewhere the poems invite the reader to overhear the responses to a lover, the tone of voice is open, lyrical, almost conversational, as in the title poem.

Don’t ask me if I love you
love comes
like a wave
a wall of grey water
silent in the unspoken night
seeping through windows
cracks beneath the doors
(“Flood Warning”)

   The intimacy of the lyrical love poem is one of the reasons I tend to favour poetry over prose. The film techniques - close focus, the stretching of time - are some of the tricks employed by both, but the urgency to preserve the lover, the kiss, the hand, the breast, and immortalise key moments, are effectively achieved in the lyrical love poem in as little space as possible.

   Many of Berta Freistadt’s stanzas take up so little room, the narrow line lengths act as if they were guarding the still air around each poem. It is in the silences at the end of lines that we hear the residues of longing.

your secret image
jerks and stutters
like TV static.
In the nights dead
I call to you.
(“Everything is Hidden”)

   While poems like “The Room” and “Everything is Hidden” are faithful to their three-stanza pattern, poems like “April” and “Monday” prefer to adopt a free-fall technique. The heavy line breaks and the absence of punctuation creates an irregular breathing pattern while the syntax unwinds to create a staggered, uneasy effect.

   In “Bad Girl 2” there are flashes of the everyday mingled with fragments of fairytale: “fingers in every witch’s pie/playing softball all the time/girl.” There are echoes of witching imagery, as well as devils and demons, elsewhere in the book. These darker elements add an essential strand to the poems, reflecting the complexities and simplicities of loving women.

   When the feminine nocturnal is exposed in the two poems “Moon Watch” and “Dark of the Moon” the poetry really bites and is unafraid to explore. The endings land well. The juxtaposition of place and the personification of the moon create an unexpected last look:

Looming risible
under Hungerford Bridge
broom invisible
She sweeps all the
jewels of the river
onto her neck
(“Dark of the Moon”)

   It is Berta Freistadt’s artful escapes into fantasy and myth, as in “Psyche In Love,” that rescue the love poems from drowning in their own metaphors; at times, though, some come perilously close. The strongest poems are united by clean line breaks and a crisp diction. The first stanza of “Love Bird” shows a careful handling of both music and imagery:

In my breast
an egg is hatching
shell is splintering
water breaking.

   The sincerity of the poet’s eye and a delicate handling of emotions can be found in this final stanza:

In my breast
yolk solidifies
albumen is translucent
with hope.

   The poems are committed to the intimacy between lovers and between the poet and reader. A dual sense of privacy and openness is maintained throughout; the “she” and “you” of the poems become universal, visually transformed. These poems are relaxed in their exploration of love between women, there are no names, no labels needed, lovers are affirmed through the act of poetry. Berta Freistadt skilfully confides rather than confesses. Flood Warning is a refreshing pamphlet for any reader, queer or not.

Five Leaves Publications, 2004, 35 pages, £4.50