Nancy Mattson: "Lisi's Letters from Karelia", Cardinal Points Literary Journal

Nancy Mattson

Last year, when I was editor on the Tuesday Poem Hub, I featured  a work titled Compasses: A Triptych by Nancy Mattson.

Compasses: A Triptych forms part of Nancy's forthcoming collection Finns and Amazons, Arrowhead Press. Finns and Amazons is a collection that celebrates early 20th century Russian women artists, such as Varvara Stepanova (the subject of Compasses), who were featured in the exhibition Amazons of the Avant-Garde, eds. Bowlt & Drutt, London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1999. Many of these women towered above their age in artistic terms, but much of their work was lost, buried or overlooked until the 1990s.

The other woman who informs Finns and Amazons is Nancy's (Great) Aunt Lisi who first emigrated from Finland to North America and later to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s; she was lost in 1939. A sequence of poems in the  Finns and Amazons collection is based on letters written by Lisi to her sister Anna, who remained in Canada. Four of these poems, together with excerpts from the letters, have just been published in the current issue of Cardinal Points, a New York-based literary journal of  Russian-focused literature. To give you a taste, here is an excerpt from the first poem:

Letter from Somewhere, 1932

In the unmapped centre of the uncut forest

before we came somewhere from Uhtua

happy workers hustled up the first buildings

in the fourth year of a five-year plan

time moves so fast whatever our purposes

restaurant sauna laundry-hut bakery shop

warehouse stables office red corner to hang

faces of leaders posters photographs banners

charts to drill this alphabet into our wooden heads

prepare us to work for the common good

as our leaders so often remind us but

our plans our wishes our feet go dragging …

(c) Nancy Mattson

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To read the full feature, including Nancy's introduction, please click here.