Breathing space July

Few books hold up well through the years but one of them is the Selected Poems of Paavo Haavikko and Tomas Transtromer, in the series of Penguin Modern European Poets.

Haavikko, a Finn, and the Swede Transtromer have a thing or two to teach poets of whatever age, whether of the art for art’s sake school or the social realist dialectical materialist type.

The duo’s poetry, in the Penguin collection presented in tandem, makes academic all arguments and debates on the function of verse.

In Haavikko’s "Sixth Poem" from The Winter Palace, he begins:

"Here, everything is as usual Except for a thousand ships And those roofless towers.

Like a river into the sea, I bring full darkness to the night;

A woman, her dress in full flower, Everlasting."

Fortunately for the reader, the lyrics don’t stop there. The Finnish poet has a knack for the playful line yet simmering with double entendre.

Many of Haavikko’s stanzas come across like refracted images in a washed urban landscape, the potential for carnivals of discovery ever present.

A section from "Birthplace" reads:

"You marry the moon and the sea and the moon and the woman: earless, all.

You’ll listen to their voices, you’ll talk to them And they say it’s a game."

Transtromer, on the other hand, has been a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, though Haavikko should too, based on this volume.

But neither of them having won the premier award in letters does not diminish any their stature as among the leading poets in their continent.

The Swede’s own verse is replete with reflections of the natural world, where stones have voices and the sky is an upturned canopy of leaves.

Transtromer’s fifth collection, Seeing in the Dark, has a number of prose poems that aptly capture a moment between diverse existences, as when the persona in "The Bookcase" fills a dead woman’s book shelf with books that seemingly breathe, and so allow those who have passed on a kind of rebirth.

A favorite poem of mine by Transtromer is one entitled "Breathing Space July," the full text of which follows:

"The man lying on his back under the high trees is also up there. He rills out in thousand-fold twigs, sways to and for, sits in an ejector seat which releases in slow motion.

"The man down by the piers narrows up his eyes at the water.

"The piers grow old more quickly than people.

"They have silver-grey timber and stones in their stomachs.

"The blinding light beats right in.

"The man traveling all day in an open boat over the glittering bays shall sleep at last inside a blue lamp while the islands creep like large moths across the glass."

There is another poem by Transtromer which was read around a couple of decades at a poetry reading in Dumaguete’s End House, the residence on Silliman campus of the late Albert Faurot.

The poem was entitled "Slow Music," and among the audience was Rowena Torrevillas, who also read that night.

At the time, I do not recall if Rowena already had a daughter. Lately we hear that the poet is in town and that her daughter, Rima, is about to get married.

There’s another poem hiding there somewhere.

The poetry of Transtromer and Haavikko reminds of such machinations of fate and time, sometimes both immaterial.

The book itself has held up well through the years, though there is a slight browning of the pages near the edges, and the glue in the binding might be weakening in certain sections.

But we can take comfort in small mercies like these: Moths, lamps, and a parallel wind from Europe.