A REVIEW OF MARIELA GRIFFOR'S, THE  PSYCHIATRIST  (Eyewear
Publishing, London, UK, 2013)

 by Carol Frost

Near the end of Mariela Griffor’s powerful collection of poems, The Psychiatrist (Eyewear Publishing Ltd, 2013), readers learn of a woman’s promise from the narrator’s point of view to her lover to leave Chile “if we ever had/ a child, and if he was not there” (“Chiloe Island”).  The personal promise explains a lot about the sense of heartbreak that lingers throughout the poems and about Griffor’s restraint in
presenting a history of Pinochet tyranny. The relatively late revelation isn’t a
ruse to keep readers in mystery but evidence of the author’s artistic decision
to keep the difficult and complex events leading up to and after her exile just
as they were. Lesser writers may have been unable to restrain themselves from
giving readers a handle early—this is my story. I was victim, hero. The
heartbreak in Griffor’s poetry is deeper than one person’s; she speaks for a country’s grief. It is only right that the reasons for her own grief are delayed.


The style of the poems is the style of memory. Griffor’s stanzas and lines with their necessary abstractions, as in “My mind is futile” and “I learned/ their laughter before code names,” and intense sensory notation are not placed for rhetorical convenience but as they might occur while musing aloud. As Griffor invents the “new sounds, new men, new women” to tell the story of the war waged by Pinochet and his followers on Chile’s “own sons and daughters, her poems bend and extend to accommodate the different dimensions and perspectives of idealism, insurgency, betrayal, brutal policy, grief, and secrecy that the book explores. 


The poems present the coup and changing allegiances, the torturers—“Romero, Quezada, Coleman”—the “group” of
leftists she was a part of, the codes and secrecy, and American complicity. There are poems, too, about family ties, of
innocence and difficulty, of love in the time of strife, and death—by bullets and for one friend, Mauricio, by an addiction to Lucky Strikes, described in “Death in Argentina” as an irony. The topics are affecting in their own right,
but Griffor’s strength is in the surprising intensity of her details. “Sometimes I drink water from the faucet,” she recalls telling Mauricio to temper the fantasy about her she knows he has developed. The detail and the motive for her telling him seem absolutely real, but there is something else about the line—the ungainliness and modest impropriety that we also recognize as real that intensifies the image.


Another example of Griffor’s skill with detail comes at the end of “Exiles,” when speaking of having left Chile for Sweden, having left spring for winter, she tells that it was “the coldest winter in one hundred years/ with a mean temperature of -27.2 C in Vittangi.”  The uncanny cold weather, we realize, gives us some sense of the physical coldness she must have endured in her first year of exile but also the coldness she needed in order to leave family, friends, her dead beloved, and her country.


The Psychiatrist gives lessons about how to write political poetry. Individual lines in individual poems may seem a bit soft, lines like “Did their bodies and souls/ escape deterioration?” and “I don’t know with any certainty/ what to do next,” but overall the poems are challenging, substantive, and full of the art that is too often made subservient to craft.


CAROL FROST's twelfth book of poems, Trilogy, is forthcoming in the fall (Tupelo Press, 2014). Others of her books include Pure, Love and Scorn, and Honeycomb. Four Pushcart Prize anthologies have reprinted her poems, and she has been the recipient of two NEA fellowships. She is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of
English at Rollins College, where she directs the yearly literary festival, Winter With the Writers.

Congratulations to Marick Press author
Karina Borowicz! Winner of the 2014 Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award for The Bees Are Waiting!!


 The Bees Are Waiting was chosen by Franz Wright for the Marick Press Poetry Prize. It won the 2014
First Horizon Award, and has been named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. It was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the May Swenson Poetry Award, and the Del Sol Poetry Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the Hudson Prize and the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. It can be purchased online from Marick Press, SPD Books, or B&N, or ordered by your local bookseller.

As you all know, the Neruda project was a sucess and exceeded its strech goal. Thanks to all of you for your support. What else can I say? Perhaps, I Love You too!!!

Update #10  From Tupelo Press
 Apr 28 2014
 64 Hours To Stretch!
  Comment
 
 

  Good morning dear backers!

 Our exciting Canto General Kickstarter campaign comes to its end in 64 hours! 
   You've already given us enormous support.  For this, we give you our warmest
thanks.  We'd still love to reach our stretch goal of $35,000 for the
illustrated edition.  We're so very close!
 If you are so moved, please consider this offer.  For any additional gift of
$100 or more we will send you one copy of this limited edition, miniature,
letterpress chapbook of lines from Canto IV, "Liberators," from Neruda's
Canto General (translated by Mariela Griffor).  The chapbook is being
made this very moment by Kirsten Miles at Virginia Arts of the Book Center,
Charlottesville, Virginia.  (The miniature Dickinson chapbooks we offered a few
weeks ago went like hotcakes!)

In his Memoirs, Neruda speaks of his people and the house where he was
given shelter in Los Lecheros on the shores of Valparaiso’s hills. He writes: "I ​​was confined to a piece of room and a corner window where I was watching harbor’s life.  From that tiny window my eyes covered only a fragment of the street. At night I saw people moving fast. It was a poor
suburb in a little street, a hundred feet below my window, it monopolized all the lighting in the neighborhood. Small stores and bowling alleys filled it. " Today the house looks great on its facade a large plaque, which reads: "Here Pablo Neruda wrote in 1948 the Canto General"

Responding to your desire for a book that is both beautiful and affordable,
here is our (revised) first Stretch Goal:
For the next $10,000 we will     commision illustrations, one for each
Canto as well as for the flyleaf and cover.


We are drawn to the work of Gabriela Vainsencher, an Argentinean-born Israeli
artist living and working in Brooklyn. She is preparing a portfolio of
preliminary drawings for our consideration. Here is one of our favorite pieces by Gabriela:

To promote our new stretch goal we have added a sweet reward for our
most popular backer levels: for a donation of $100 you will receive
a copy of Canto General PLUS a set of 3 refrigerator magnets designed by
Gabriela Vainsencher. Or, for a donation of $40 you will receive the set of
3 Vainsencher refrigerator magnets.

Another beautiful reward offered! For a pledge of $150 you will receive a copy of Canto General and a miniature letterpress book (hand printed and numbered, limited edition) by book artist Kirsten Miles with Holly Odom the Virginia Art of the Book Center.  Choice of Pablo Neruda--eight lines from Canto IV, "The Liberators," Canto General OR of Emily Dickinson Poem #52.

 We're nine days into our Kickstarter  project, and well on the way to reaching
our first stretch goal of $10,000 to help fund the illustrated
edition. We have already reached just over $2,500, 25% of our new goal!  
Check out our new rewards, including beautiful
miniature letterpress chapbooks of verses by both our beloved Neruda and
Emily Dickinson!

Kirsten Miles, a member of a Book Arts organization in Charlottesville,
Virginia, contributes five miniature books from a collection made by members.
She explores the relationship of the book form to the poem with her cover art
and unique "windows" and is working on a similar book with a verse from "The
Liberators", from the Canto.
The second book will also be letterpressed, with arboreal-themed cover art and
windows into the canopy of the poem.
 The Emily Dickinson text is untitled poem #52 in Thomas Johnson's
  edition: "Whether my bark when down at sea . . ." The Neruda text is 8
lines from Canto
  IV, "The Liberators".
 Please tweet and share our project. Join us on our climb! 

BOYS
    A torturer does not redeem himself through suicide. 
     But it does help. 
                                     - Mario Benedetti


The boys from the neighbourhood,
some of them, stay
behind the mud and the rain.

I ask myself what has become of
Romero, Quezada, Coleman?
Did their bodies and souls
escape deterioration?

Did they go into the army
to do their duty as soldiers
of the fatherland, the ones
who protect us from hate and 
foreign tyrants?

Did they climb like the General
by usurping through disloyalty,
lies, secret codes and
finally through money?

Did they have families and
continue living in the city
as if nothing had happened?

Or did they sell their modest houses,
move to another neighbourhood where
no one knows anything about them?

 There they will come in the evening and
will wash the remnants of dried 
blood from their fingers.

Will they look for their wives,
give them a kiss, touch their bodies
with those same hands?

Will their daytime nightmares
be cast upon those who know
nothing of where they
come at the end of the night?
Will they return their heads,

smashed by the memories they left
in the cells, streets, apartments 
to a soft warm pillow
that washes away their sacrileges?

What happened to the men
I knew and never saw again?
Did they turn themselves into
men hungry for justice or
did they leave little by little in silence?

Did they put on their clothes
in the morning without knowing
whether they would return in 
the evening to their dear ones?

Did they learn to kill in
clandestine training or
did they become more men with the
passing of these hard times?

Did they love like those pure men
I met on those evenings
when to play was
all our universe?



HOW CHAOS
BEGINS

A butterfly flying in the streets of 
Santiago on a September day.



VALENTINE'S DAY IN
DETROIT
                 For E.


The sounds of children playing in the snow,
a bunch of orange roses and a sign
”By my Valentine“
on the round surface of this day. 

Are these moments similar
to the ones we dreamt of?
We couldn’t answer, we are not others.
We are the ones standing still,
almost faceless.

 Here we are inventing words
on this hammock despite
the baby spit.

 A house untied to the ground,
a laundry room of nostalgias,
a window clouded by
little sleep, a coat of 

memories we remove
every February, a simple grin
and a Sanders chocolate box,
then, we grow to the
light like sweet peas.





ABSOLUTION
                        For M. Conejeros


When the call of the rooster awakens me once again in the morning
and the dark red of dusk enters through my pupils and doesn't hurt
my heart, when my voice can pronounce
again his name and the ground that 
I  walk upon cannot be so hard and cold
and winter disappears, when
your children and my children can play
all day without brawls, and the sounds 
of the street are all recognizable and clear,
not foreign, you and I can 
look into each other’s eyes
and discover that we still can smile,
when you come looking for me and need
to know if I am there, I will tell you
that I’ve never left, I have always been waiting
for an encounter, a tear that will fall down your cheek
to wash way forever the misery of having lost him.

April 10, 2001

 
DETROIT

When I drive down from
Grosse Pointe on Warren
a sudden knot in my heart
is born.

Solitude is roaming
with the images of
a city broken and gone.

I cross my fingers
hoping I won't see
any black cats crossing
these steaming manholes.

Detroit, so full of churches,
so where is God?


Could He be hiding
under politicians'coats?

A "mon cher" looked
through my car window
and believed he melted snow.

His eyes aflame
consumed two seconds
when the red light stopped.

City in flames,
who took away your palaces?

It was not me.
I am a foreigner,
I just came to see.

Detroit, wake up
from your profound sleep.
Rebuild your empire.
Rebuild it so I can see.

Forget about
black LaKeishas
and your white Portias.
Forget about your yellow Chengs
and your brown Carolas.

Let the golden haze
that rusts on your aura
shine proudly
on your face again.

Let a feeling of goodness
drench the city like a storm.
Let your dreams flourish and endure.

Turn the holy fight into salutation.
Let the happiness return.
Leave your vinegar grief behind.
Let me see, Detroit. Let me see.

As I mentioned in previous notes and blogs my translation of the Canto General by Pablo Neruda is coming out from the small press Tupelo Press in MA. and they need to help to complete the project. Read below the information they put out to readers and participants:

Tupelo Press Project:

Tupelo Press, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary press, are in the final stages of publishing the
most important book of our 15-year history:  a fully contemporary, English
translation of Neruda’s monumental work, Canto General:  the first
translation by a native Spanish speaker, the first of the famous Chilean by a
native Chilean, and the first by a woman.  We are honored to be working
with poet/translator Mariela Griffor and to have the blessing of Fundacíon Pablo
Neruda to publish this book for the English-speaking public.  A new
translation for a new generation!

Our Costs:
 We have already put years of time and money into this project.  All we need now is $25,000 to
cross the finish line and deliver the book to your hands. Here is the breakdown
of remaining costs:  $5,200/Polishing, Line- & Copy-Editing/"Making it Transcendent"--------
   $3,000/ Book Design/"Making it Beautiful"-----------
   $12,000 /Printing/"Making it Real"--------------
   $4,800/ Advertising and Publicity/"Spreading the Word"--------------
 Total $25,000 
With your contribution now we can publish this new Canto General, a new translation for a
new generation!  

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/979776234/329910534?token=8a81707b