Reviewed by Jim Welke

The poetry in The Psychiatrist,
written by Mariela Griffor and published by Eyewear  Publishing, vibrates with enough
resonant force to shatter the complacent sang-froid of any reader with at
least an iota of empathy in their veins.  The fifty poems recorded in this
narrow volume do share revelations of interior,  psychological torment to fit
the title, The Psychiatrist, but they also  reflect on the human
condition at large, particularly the deleterious effects of  political injustice
on the human psyche. The numbing pressure of threatened  violence plus the
trauma of realized violence bears down on this verse,  compacting and distilling
it into the sort of clarity that a confrontation with  imminent destruction
induces: dilation of time, heightened sensory awareness,  eerie calm. Often the
violence, the trauma, occurs in recollection as though the  writer invokes post-traumatic  stress disorder. A riff on
insomnia called “Poem without a number: house,” reads in part:

 I remember:
 a barricade. A homemade bomb
 made by my hands, the image of my lover and
 in my head a semi-automatic
 as redemption
 I beg forgiveness of all of you.
 The rain is too thin to stop the fire.
 My legs and arms are heavy.
 Behind me Santiago blazes
 and bullets whiz at the sight of who we were,
 ancestral pain I cannot shake off.
 His body disappears from the earth into the air.
 A heart spattered in the streets follows me in my defeat.

 Some of the work reflects on healing, but the injury hovers just out of 
sight, in shadow. In “Valentine’s Day in Detroit” Ms. Griffor eludes those 
demons for a spell when she sheds her “coat of memories:”
 
A house untied to the ground,
 a laundry room of nostalgia,
 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.


Mariela Griffor, born in Concepcion in 1961, grew up in Chile during the
  sixties and seventies. She was twelve when General Augusto Pinochet — backed in Parliament by the
Christian Democrats and the National Party, and  encouraged if not overtly
supported by the US government — led a coup d’etat  against President Salvador  Allende, who died that day at the
presidential palace, La Moneda, either by  murder or suicide depending on whose
account you trust. (Does it matter? Allende  resisted the assault for six hours
with an AK-47 given to him by Fidel Castro.)  For a succinct and remarkably
lucid account of the events leading up to the  coup, give a read to a piece
Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote back in 1974, “Why  Allende had to die.” Pinochet’s junta
wrested power from Allende on  September 11, 1973 (Pinochet formally
ascended to  the presidency in 1974) and ruled
until 1990. During his tenure, Pinochet  and his minions ruthlessly suppressed
opposition; mutilated bodies of his “enemies” appeared in the streets daily. Yet
the opposition persevered,  coalesced, resisted suppression. In “Sunday walk,
urban talk” Ms. Griffor  writes:


  In those days we didn’t need much.
A heavy ammunition was resting in our hearts.


 None of wanted to be compared with Guevara.
 Too tiring. Too much. Almost a sacrilege.
 Not for what people think.
 None of us wanted to leave the country
 or experience any adventures.

 The level of influence exerted by the US government to expel Allende from
  power might be debatable (although cash infusions by the CIA to support a
  trucker and shopkeeper’s strike prior to the coup that accelerated decline of
  the economy and undermined Allende’s support seem fairly  well documented),
but the CIA  admits support for the Pinochet regime after
the coup. Banks  and other corporations in the US also
propped up Pinochet.

 A cynical proponent of realpolitik might argue that Pinochet would 
have consolidated power with or without US assistance, and thus it was in the
US “interest” to buy influence. But that obscures the more notable opportunity 
 missed by the US to stand up for the rule of law and the unassailable
imperative  of democracy. The US did nothing to roll back the coup and restore a 
democratically elected president to Chile’s executive branch. That constitutes
a  sin of omission that suggests de facto approval of Pinochet’s action, and by 
induction implicates the US government in the oppression, torture, and murder 
committed by Pinochet’s grim apparatus.

 While Pinochet consolidated power and “disappeared” the opposition, Ms.
  Griffor passed through her formative years. By 1980, she would have been
  nineteen years old and witness to indescribable turmoil in her country. The
  extent of her participation in the resistance may now be of importance only to
  her, but clearly she sacrificed and suffered to end the torture, bloodshed, and
  economic oppression that plagued Chile during her years there. In an excerpt
  from “Love for a subversive,” she writes:
 
I remember only the
 scars over your lips,
 scars over your left eyebrow,
 the pieces of flesh missing
 around your nostrils.
  
The pain of your scars
 wakes me up at night and I hurt
 as I did giving birth to your child.
I don’t know with any certainty
 what to do next.


The added pain of exile must only exacerbate the effects of that suffering 
 and sacrifice: in 1985, age 24, she left Chile for Sweden, and in 1998 moved to 
 Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan with her American husband. In “The Rain,” she 
 writes:



The sound of the rain in Michigan
 reminds me of the rugged winters in my old country
 the cold feet in old shoes,
 the fast sound of the water hitting the ground,
 the smell of eucalyptus in the air.
 I close my eyes and make a wish:
 wish I could see, for just a moment, your hair
 dancing over your face
 trying to escape the weather.


At home in Michigan, her thoughts drift back to recollections crystallized in
  her consciousness by chaos induced adrenaline, ready to surface with heedless
  insistence when triggered by signal events like the whispering patter of rain,
  reminiscent of The Narrator  in Proust’s “À la recherche du temps
perdu.” And the poems in this  volume propel you through
time, backward and forward, with the lyrical grace of  Ms. Griffor’s delicate
phrasing. Her suffering as well as her joy, hope,  idealism, fear, doubt, and
thrill saturate these pages like a stain. If you read “The Psychiatrist,” you
will feel what she feels, and that’s the amazing feat of  finely polished
poetry: the sensations conveyed are visceral and involuntary;  sensations
transcend literal interpretation of the words on the page. But pay  attention,
those sequences of words are artful and melodious; like songs, you  can read
these poems over and over and they continue to satisfy. That they  appear in a
language not her first passes understanding; they represent a Nabokov-ian achievement of  language
facility.


While Ms. Griffor’s poetry stands on its own apart from the context of her
  life and the political atmosphere in Chile that influenced it during her early
  years, the context seems worth emphasizing for its relevance to the situation
  the United States and other western industrialized countries find themselves in
  now: growing wealth inequality, decline of the middle class, expansion of the
  ranks of working poor one bad day away from the streets, the obliteration of
  labor unions and social safety nets, the rise of religious fundamentalism and
  right-wing intolerance of anyone near the margin of society, and the growing
  influence of corporate money in political decision-making.

 All of these afflictions were endemic in Chile in the 1970’s when Allende
  finally achieved election to the Presidency after many previous tries. He
sought  to undo the economic and political inequity in Chile, and thus
represented a  grave threat to the status quo, both in Chile and abroad. The
entrenched,  comfortable right felt as much fear of Allende as the
disenfranchised, restive  left felt gratitude for him.

 Perhaps it stretches credulity not much at all to imagine that social
  upheaval on a similar scale might grip some rich industrialized nation in a
  decade or two if the pendulum of political influence wielded by the oligarchic
  right does not soon reach its apex.

 Opposition does exist. Some might judge the Spanish
Indignados  movement followed by the Occupy movement  failures, but these might be the
first groans of a sleepy giant awakening.  Certainly the Occupy movement gained
traction much faster and wider than anyone  anticipated, even the inspired crew
in Zuccotti Park. While any sane citizen  hopes for a gentle political solution
to untenable inequality, the danger posed  by a fearful right should not be
dismissed. The right reacted instantly to the  Occupy movement with fear and
loathing, i.e. “smelly hippies.” Fear often  motivates irrational behavior more
forcefully than anger. If the reaction of the  right in the US to the election
of the timid, compromise-seeking Barack Obama  offers any insight, imagine the
corporate-financed reaction to the election in  either Western Europe or the
United States of an all out Socialist modeled after  Allende. Chile’s past might
be prologue for any number of nations that find  themselves drifting toward the
unknowable tolerance threshold of the poor for  obvious, pernicious inequity.
Greece recently spun unnervingly near to anarchy.  It would be deliberately
obtuse to ignore instability of the system we’ve  created, or allowed others to
create as a result of our indifference and  passivity.


With Ms. Griffor’s personal reminder of the depths as well as the summits
  human compassion and aspiration can reach, those of us pre-occupied with
“first-world” problems might pause for a moment and reflect on the fragility of
  our existence: economically, politically, and environmentally. History marches
  on indifferent to the quiet wishes of passive bystanders; history heeds only
the  demands of the forceful. Surely there will be resolution to growing
inequity;  the question will be how do we achieve it? Acute pain often yields
fine art. If  we pause and read a bit of poetry, listen to the murmuring oracles
in our midst,  we might manage to vote our way toward collective sanity, if we
scoff at wisdom  we might again see rockets falling on the palace roof. Mariela
Griffor’s The  Psychiatrist offers a good place to start.

 From “Sunday walk, urban talk:”

 Ignacio, what happened?
 We were almost sure we would make it out alive.
 What kind of country is this that falls in love
 with death every time freedom disappears
 from its core?

 What kind of country is this
 that kills its own sons and daughters


   *******

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Here below the post from Tupelo for the poems of August 2013.

"Our seven volunteers for August are: Lynn Doyle,
Karen L. George, Mariela Griffor, Rachel Kubie, Denise Rodriguez, M. E.
Silverman, and Scott Whitaker. Read their full bios by
clicking here.


Please follow their work (by clicking “Follow” on the bottom of the page),
and feel free to acknowledge their generosity and creativity with a show of your
admiration and support by donating on their behalf to Tupelo Press. (Click here to donate,
scroll down to the form at the bottom, and put a contributor’s name in the
“honor” field.) Just imagine what a challenge it is to write 30 new poems in 30
days!"

One / by Mariela Griffor


How was Markus looking for some comfort
in the heart of his wife without noticing that she didn’t
even care about his search? It was kind of cruel
to have met in the high school and for years to call
each other sweetheart because the sweetheart
was not living there anymore. Her mind moved out
years ago when money was not enough and the
payment due at the end of the month broke her heart,
she didn’t know about real needs until she meet him.
Her body stays with them. They were too many to
abandon them and
forget about them she thought at times.
This cruelty would not be pardoned by
her own family
and friends and she did care about what they thought about
her.

The nine volunteers for June are: Sally Fisher, Lois P. Jones, Janet
Kenning, Jacqueline Kolosov, Lea Marshall, James Kirk Maynard, Heidi Johannesen
Poon, Lisa Donne Sampson, and Larissa Szporluk. Read
their full bios by clicking here.

A VISION

When I was a child the world seemed
to be frolic around me. He was around
from morning to night, seven
days a week, like a cat, a poplar,
a cousin who wants to play.

First publish in Crack the Spine Magazine:
http://diversionsjournal.wordpress.com/

 A Salon and Reading with Kjell Espmark, Monica Espmark, and Mariela Griffor.
Wow, blessed to even be in the audience of these established writers. Kjell is a distinguished professor, longtime writer and poet, and on the committee for the
Nobel Prize in Literature. Monica, his wife, is also a writer who focuses on
bibliography and has interviewed many important minds. Mariela founded and runs
Marick Press and is also a wonderful poet. The three talked about publishing a bit and then took
questions from the audience, giving tons of advice to young writers. Mariela and
Kjell read poems from their latest works to a small audience later that night.
Follow Alison here: http://diversionsjournal.wordpress.com/