Nicholas Houghton reviews
Piano
by Eva Bourke
Despite
having lived the latter part of her life in Galway, Ireland, Eva Bourke’s
German heritage and education are woven seamlessly into her most recent
collection, Piano. A background
rooted in the heart of continental Europe, then nurtured on its most westerly
point, has granted her a feel for atavistic detail and oblique metaphor that
enables her to take us on a journey to the essence of existence.
The
eponymous third poem in the first section, ‘The Soul of the Piano’ is anything
but oblique though, it is a statement of intent, enclosing the poems to come
within the smooth polished wood of Bourke’s metaphorical piano, while
simultaneously placing the piano at the centre of the poems:
The
soul of the piano smells of damp backyards, potato soup, harbour bars after
rain, of school proms, war and gun powder, perfume and palace gardens in
spring.
It
is the deftly played notes of this piano that augment our journey through
Bourke’s world of people and things to the centre of experience.
In
the second section, ‘Achill Kileen’ takes a folk custom of old Ireland, that of
burying unbaptised babies near to prehistoric graveyards in the hope that the
ancient gods would look after their souls, and places it in a contemporary
setting, deftly mixing past with present. The first stanza ends with:
…far
out between two rocks, the sun
opens
a blue door
and
ushers a trawler and crew into
the
glittering high rise of the day.
But
by the third stanza:
I
stand in a field above the sea
strewn
with pieces
of
white quartz
each
marking a child’s grave.
By
moving from the everyday beauty of trawlers going to sea in this fundamentally
unchanged environment, via the conduit of the grief of parents burying children
too young even to be named:
But
the young parents who knelt
on
the hillside knew them by heart-
grief they were called,
loss and anguish.
to
a tight focus on a small patch of quartz marked grass, Bourke has forged a connection
between past and present, the everyday and the seemingly insurmountable. Work
and grief are always with us.
The
shifting nature of our relationship with time and nature is a theme that
recurs, and is ultimately uplifting, as in ‘Evening near Letterfrack,’ one of
the many prose poems, where two women are observed walking along a beach:
of
plaited locks, the other’s head shone in the evening light
like
weathered driftwood, smooth, bleached and silvered….
….where
were divisions now? The line between
the
water and the sky, all binaries and opposites
dissolved
here at the end of Europe.
These
two timeless figures could be from any age, and bring a healing perspective to
some of the images that have gone before.
The
poet as recorder of scenes is explored in a series of poems that address the
power of photographs seen years after they have been taken, the most powerful
of which is ‘Self-portrait, 1939.’ Here, the decay of the photograph becomes a
pathetic fallacy, leading the subject to ruminate on her own eventual death:
Was
it some lingering illness
that
killed me or the darkroom toxins?
allied
to the spread of war,
or
was I buried beneath the rubble
of
Munich?
The
poem then opens out, growing further from the detail of the photograph,
creating a sense of foreboding:
Should
I have watched the signs,
the
rallies in the squares,
the
marching songs, shouts shots,
the
birds scattering in a panic
from
the treetops on the left,
the
ineradicable stain that spread
across
the image from the margins
blotting
out the world?
It
is rare to find a poet who can move so swiftly and yet in such a perfectly
judged way from musing on their own mortality to the horrors of global
conflict, without seeming self-indulgent; Bourke achieves this seemingly
without effort.
Bourke’s
ability to move from the quotidian to the transcendent is much in evidence in a
series of prose poems toward the end of the collection. In ‘Journal from the Mirrored Cities,’ the:
bleached
blondes talking incessantly, serve underworld delights, hot mustard, aromatic
wines, blandishments,
expands
exhilaratingly to:
the
peace-keeping army of stars streaming across roof tops, the great fireworks in
summer that consume the night.
Later
in ‘Journal from the Mirrored Cities,’ a bus journey delivers an everyday
vision written in the type of magnificently quiet language that pervades the
collection:
The
young woman beside me on the bus who was plugged into another universe wore a
sheer blouse over her shorts and a thin red necklace from Bruges. She was so
beautiful that even her freckles were celestial, a fine spray of golden
constellations.
The
penultimate poem, ‘Koan,’ circles back, recapturing the sense of faith that
pervades the earlier poems, and connecting it to actual religious imagery:
despite
the explosives the great Buddhas are still there guarding
their valley,….
and:
….demonic
intertwined forms, the devils wear delicate beaded
skirts
to cover their shame, Isaac
leans
his young head into the crook of his father’s arm whose
other arm
is
already lowering the knife.
Ultimately
though, the poet leaves us on our own:
a
single player in an empty court
in
darkness, fog and silence.
The
poems in this collection encompass spirituality, human suffering, beauty and
kindness. This is the type of book that will resonate with readers of all ages.
Much like a piano, it reflects the player’s commitment to that instrument’s
complex possibilities, and I shall certainly be re-visiting these poems.
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