By disappearing
in verse these women struggle to locate their own voice and vision. The
results supersede routine feminist-attack poetry
by building geniune female persons rather than theoretical
politics. This brave decision guarantees
all involved travel gentle terrain
to the next threshold of understanding.
In "Camera" Heather
Faulkner demostrates poetic skill and mpassion in describing a lover's
scars of past child abuse:
"But what affected me most
were your eyes,
looking up,
wide and
terrified
at his towering intrusion
I could feel your heart palpitating
within
It was years later,
you had the same eyes
when we touched.
In those frozen moments
your shutter clicked
and I became him."
A memory-searing
night of hatred,
houligans and battered hope
are Das Francikova's
"Praha, October 28, 1995:
I'm scared of the hatred
there are hundreds
of them today
the police won't stop them
there is nobody to get up out
of here...
Hours later
I'm waiting to meet you
still unsafe/staring eyes
like a needle in my back...
Halloween
getting to know friends
mask and gestures
I am forcing words
to fall from my lips
and language is mysterious
and the emerald
ritual--
I'm lighting fire, you stir
sugar
we both blow the flame
we all celebrate
we are
still alive, safe."
Magda Kolinova takes
us to that universally-praised "Friday Night" where a week's worth of love,
lust and longing is deposited.
"I feel happy because
your eyes are glowing/your body is tense but still so relaxed/I look at
you and my head swims/I feel happy because Friday night is ours/a holy
night of love which is beginning now/and we are making our love bed on
the carpet."
With "Memories of
the Slavia Coffee House," Lenka Kralova reveals the unnerving and exciting
moments felt when traveling the world and suddenly finding you have lost
your rhythm and
a part of youself.
"I'm in a coffee house in Brussels
glancing into another room
where faces
are flashing
people speaking various languages
and they don't
understand me
nor I understand them
but they smile
at me
over their mugs of coffee, their
teapots
over steaming
aromas and flavors
I'm feeling a bit of time and
space
and the waitress blushes
looking at
my mug
again empty
of coffee
so far unavailable in Prague...
I feel like steam over
some strange town
and I miss the Slavia Coffee
House in Prague."
Vera Pivonkova yearns for downtime
in our lives, blocks of time set side to escape mechanized society and
reunite self and nature "Into the silence:
She teaches me to speak
without words
she teaches me to watch
shadows
listen to rhythm,
sing from notes
written by someone else...
She calls me simply: my little
one
you will never see me
my pole is my nakedness
but I have realized that
she is a desire
with a simple name
SOLITUDE"
Sarka Viskova discovers in "Beethoven"
a person disappearing in music and made beter by the experience.
"Through Beethoven
(whom she adored)
her fingers felt
full bodies.
She taught her fingers to touch
black and white bodies
that during their
love making
sounded like
the music
of Beethoven
She wrote an answer with his
lips
Dear Beethoven...
since you
were born
I've been learning to love."
There is a certain
emotional logic attached to The Art of Disappearing-- a group created by
women artists. In masculinized societies throughout the world, women have
to overcome unique obstacles and pressures in order to make their presence
known and voice heard.
The poems in this Czech/English collection are excellent examples of feminine perspectives often ignored or censored (sometimes by women editors) because such views tend to forsake dogma and instead embrace freedom and meaning via gender and individuality. If artists are etermined to face the world with a deeper understanding we must never ecome so lost in art that we cannot distinguish it from reality. What we iscover in ourselves through art may very well be the foundation for a ore honest and peaceful planet.