sheenaghpugh | Review of Iktsuarpok, by Nora Nadjarian, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2023 (Reply)

A short journey, before doors slide open and they empty into their lives (“Clay Animation”)

The above line, ending a poem in which the poet speculates about fellow-passengers on the Tube, is a good place to start thinking about these poems. Nearly all are short vignettes, moments, transient but deeply experienced states of being. The title poem, indeed, centres on an Inuit word that describes the state of impatient excitement one gets into while awaiting a longed-for visitor. “I found the word which/starts here and ends when you arrive.” The weird thing is, the poem leaves one feeling that however welcome this visit (and this is a poet who seems, at least in these poems, delightfully and unusually at ease in relationships), it cannot possibly be as enjoyable as this state that precedes it.

Poets who work in a small compass are considerably helped if they happen to be good at coining memorable phrases. It’s a gift that can become a curse if overdone, turning poems into a collection of soundbites, but here it is well used, sometimes as a perfect shorthand for a state of mind (“the sound of listening to nothing at night”), sometimes to provide a close that echoes in the mind, like the ending of “The coast guard found an empty life raft”:

    The coastline called us back.
    Throw out everything you own, lose weight.
    I tipped all my words overboard,
    Lastly, the unreliable narrator.

There are many references to exile and war in these poems, not surprisingly since the poet’s Armenian grandparents fled Turkey for obvious reasons at the start of the twentieth century and settled in Cyprus. Nadjarian, born in 1966, was the second Cypriot-born generation in her family, but then of course politics and divisiveness caught up with them in their new location and the poet ended up being educated in England (she later returned to Cyprus and now lives in Nicosia). I’m mildly puzzled, by the way, by the dust-jacket’s description of this as a “first collection”, because I know there’s been at least one other (Cleft in Twain, 2003), and thought there were more. The violence of the war imagery, e.g. “a country is being chainsawed”, from “We didn’t die, we levitated”, spills over into poems on other themes, like “Downpour”, which ends “still killing us, this rain, with its bullets”. There are also poems that reference relationship break-ups, and a pervading sense of mortality:

    We were once human and to human
    we may never return
    (“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Uncertainty”)

In view of all this, it is perhaps odd that the overriding impression the collection left with me was one of colour and light, joy, even. I think this is partly because of the vividness of her observation and description which, in defiance of the dictum about happiness writing white, actually seems to work best on that theme. “Hibiscus” is by far the most successful and sensual evocation of sexual climax from a female point of view that I have ever read, and in “The Perfect Child Emerges”, she lifts the everyday mentions of “sucking and sobbing” and “shiny new teeth” with a beautifully oblique allusion to the myth of Apollo’s birth and brief infancy:

  Then, with incredible speed away from you, a tall boy runs from one season to the   next. Away from this baby in the cot sucking its thumb, oblivious to the sudden earth, the endless sky.

Nuts to Larkin; this is how to use the “myth-kitty” to universalise personal experience.