Review: Finns and Amazons, by Nancy Mattson
Nancy Mattson is a Canadian-born poet of Finnish extraction, who lives in London. She thus falls into the Displaced Writers category that a lot of my favourite poets come from; there's something about having a sense of displacement, rather than a sense of place, that gives a poet's language and observation an extra edge, almost as if they don't have a comfort zone.
Her collection Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press 2012) provides, in its organisation, a fascinating example of how, in writing, one chance stimulus tends to interact with others and lead in all sorts of unexpected directions. She sees an exhibtion of early 20th-century Russian women artists; at first no poems emerge but later an encounter with a portrait by Sonia Delaunay, another Russian woman artist of the same period throws up a connection with Finland, and leads the poet back in time to her antecedents, particularly the story of a Finnish great-aunt whose personality comes over strongly but whose fate is shadowy.
In the book's first section, which concerns the women artists, the most striking, for me, are the first three, centring on the displaced Sonia in Paris, looking at tapestries in the Musée de Cluny and letting her memories remake them:
       I thread myself into the panels,
       unpick the unicorn, stitch in the elk
       I saw in Karelia
             ("Sonia Visits Le Musée De Cluny)
The first poem, "Simultaneity 1", does something I wouldn't have thought would work, repeatedly using single-word lines and white space to slow down the tempo and point up a crucial moment. It does work, especially when read aloud, though I'd have to quote much of the poem to prove it.
In the other three sections of the poem, we are on the track of elusive family ghosts: a great-aunt who vanished in Soviet Karelia, a grandmother whose pseudonymous newspaper articles are tantalisingly present but unfindable in an unindexed archive, a language yielding only grudgingly to translation (Finnish doesn't even belong to the Indo-European language group and has precious little in common with most European languages). Fittingly, the section on "loss" begins with "What Can Be Translated":
       A door is not a tree though both are wood
The lost great-aunt is present through letters, some of which are both reproduced in the book and transmuted into poems. Letters are a means of communication, but these, while on the one hand showing much of her sturdy, slightly awkward personality, are also tantalisingly self-censored (it not being politic, in Stalinist Russia, to write just what one was thinking) and incomplete in that the other half of the correspondence is missing. Again the message is unknowability, the impossibility of translation which in no way diminishes the urge to try.
The great-aunt of course is also a displaced person, who had left Finland first for America and later for Russia. In her last letter (1939), disillusioned by events, she is coming to the conclusion that "people who spend their whole lives in one place are the happiest". Maybe, but it's the displaced who often observe the most clearly and write the most memorably.
Her collection Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press 2012) provides, in its organisation, a fascinating example of how, in writing, one chance stimulus tends to interact with others and lead in all sorts of unexpected directions. She sees an exhibtion of early 20th-century Russian women artists; at first no poems emerge but later an encounter with a portrait by Sonia Delaunay, another Russian woman artist of the same period throws up a connection with Finland, and leads the poet back in time to her antecedents, particularly the story of a Finnish great-aunt whose personality comes over strongly but whose fate is shadowy.
In the book's first section, which concerns the women artists, the most striking, for me, are the first three, centring on the displaced Sonia in Paris, looking at tapestries in the Musée de Cluny and letting her memories remake them:
       I thread myself into the panels,
       unpick the unicorn, stitch in the elk
       I saw in Karelia
             ("Sonia Visits Le Musée De Cluny)
The first poem, "Simultaneity 1", does something I wouldn't have thought would work, repeatedly using single-word lines and white space to slow down the tempo and point up a crucial moment. It does work, especially when read aloud, though I'd have to quote much of the poem to prove it.
In the other three sections of the poem, we are on the track of elusive family ghosts: a great-aunt who vanished in Soviet Karelia, a grandmother whose pseudonymous newspaper articles are tantalisingly present but unfindable in an unindexed archive, a language yielding only grudgingly to translation (Finnish doesn't even belong to the Indo-European language group and has precious little in common with most European languages). Fittingly, the section on "loss" begins with "What Can Be Translated":
       A door is not a tree though both are wood
The lost great-aunt is present through letters, some of which are both reproduced in the book and transmuted into poems. Letters are a means of communication, but these, while on the one hand showing much of her sturdy, slightly awkward personality, are also tantalisingly self-censored (it not being politic, in Stalinist Russia, to write just what one was thinking) and incomplete in that the other half of the correspondence is missing. Again the message is unknowability, the impossibility of translation which in no way diminishes the urge to try.
The great-aunt of course is also a displaced person, who had left Finland first for America and later for Russia. In her last letter (1939), disillusioned by events, she is coming to the conclusion that "people who spend their whole lives in one place are the happiest". Maybe, but it's the displaced who often observe the most clearly and write the most memorably.
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