Oriana Ivy is the winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry 2011 from Finishing Line Press, which published her winning chapbook manuscript, April Snow, last year.
Oriana, born in Poland and who came to the U. S. when she was 17, is a well-known poet and frequent reader in the San Diego, California area (where I recently heard her read poems from April Snow and other poems). In addition to being published in The Best American Poetry 1992 (her poem chosen by Charles Simic, guest editor, with David Lehman, series editor), her poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod and many other journals and anthologies. Oriana leads the San Diego Poetry Salon, teaches poetry workshops and writes an outstanding poetry-and-culture blog (http://oriana-poetry.blogspot.com).
Oriana writes deeply absorbing poems, rich in images that startle with their steely exactness. In her new chapbook, April Snow, poems mainly inhabit the Central Europe of her memory, the post-war Poland of her girlhood. Here are keenly observed moments rendered with abiding warmth (toward family, loves and nature) and honesty (about history and her own past). Her language, at once elegant and nimble, amplifies the craftsmanship of these poems.
Here are my two favorite poems from April Snow:
GRANDMOTHER’S LAUGHTER
One day in the street my grandmother
stops before another grandmother.
Both stammer: "It’s you –
you – in Auschwitz – "
Turning to me: "She and I shared
the same blanket. Every night she said,
'You’ve got more than I'
and pulled, and I pulled back,
and so we’d tug across the bunk – "
And the two grandmothers laugh.
In the middle of a crowded
sidewalk, in old women’s dusk,
widows’ browns and grays,
they are laughing like two schoolgirls –
tears rain down the cracked
winter of their cheeks.
On Piotrkowska Avenue,
on the busiest street,
they are tugging that thin blanket.
They are pulling back.
CATERPILLAR OF SMOKE
Sudety Mountains, Silesia
Mornings glittered like panes of ice.
Near a villa that legend whispered
Hitler gave to Eva Braun,
I found, abandoned in the dormitory,
a book of poems that didn’t rhyme.
Sun flamed the long candelabras
of icicles about to crash. I copied
phrases: a caterpillar of smoke.
My cousin Ewa astonished everyone,
solving math problems for fun.
Arms locked, slipping on the ice-glazed road,
we walked past the villa of Eva Braun,
high-school virgins secretly wondering
what it was like to be Hitler’s mistress.
I had another secret:
alone in the white forest I knew
the poem of winter had no words
unless they were crows,
stitching the mountains with crooked seams.
I was fourteen. The future flashed
as though a careless angel
opened the wrong door in time.
Later, thousands of miles of clouds
away from Warsaw, I found it
again – poetry after Auschwitz.
With a murderer’s hands
I caressed a woman’s breasts –
One could say anything, then:
beauty didn’t have to be beautiful –
news to me who grew up with
rhyme of silence and meter of lies.
When does the future begin –
a caterpillar of smoke
slanting white winter sky –
the spruce lost in stars of frost,
snow deeper and deeper snow.
previously published in Quarterly West
Click to see book on Amazon.
