Stitching History: Review of The Marta Poems by Susan J. Atkinson
Susan J. Atkinson, The Marta Poems.
Silver Bow Publishing, 2020. $23.95 CAD
Order a copy from Silver Bow Publishing.
Susan J. Atkinson’s historical poetry collection, The Marta Poems, documents with vivid grit the life of a Polish woman, Marta, displaced by World War II. The narrative follows Marta’s journey from Poland to Siberia to Rhodesia to England and finally to Canada, where she spent the rest of her life. Atkinson was Marta’s real-life neighbour and crafted these narratives-in-verse after years of conversation with Marta, and after her passing, with the help of rain-sodden cardboard boxes of documents—the physical remainders of a lifetime of migrancy.
Atkinson’s “Notes” page states that this collection was “borne out of an unlikely friendship between Marta and the Poet, that sprung into hours of storytelling and the sharing of tales.” Knowing these poems were crafted not in awe of a well-known figure but of a friend met by chance next door makes them even more exquisite. The experience of reading The Marta Poems leapt off the page and made me more attuned to the elderly people I know: my neighbour Eleanor, my own Papa, to the rich personal histories people carry within them. There is a great deal of respect and care in Atkinson’s approach to her subject matter and plenty of quiet humility too, as though acknowledging that the act of writing these poems tended perhaps more to discovery than to transformation. These are poems that distill years of active listening.
Marta’s story begins with her birth in Poland in 1925, in which Atkinson writes of infant Marta with intimate knowledge. One must imagine that Atkinson’s impression of Marta is strong enough that to have known her in old age, one would have been able to recognize her at birth. These poems fulfill the poet’s longing to know this elder in her youth and young womanhood. The first poem sets the tone for a tenderness that pushes the limits of how well it is possible to know a person: “She didn’t know the time, / whether it was light / dark or that curious colour / in between / when the sun settles in ribbons / and there’s a quietness / before night — / she would have liked that” (15).
The statement almost sounds like something a mother would say about her child and yet, the lines before remind us that the details of this life presented to us are, in large part, imagined: “(there are no other details / no one spoke of her birth)” (15).
With these two statements Atkinson sets the tensile premise for the unfolding life of Marta: the tether to fact and history, and the poet’s imaginative and sensory telling of this quilted quasi-biography. I say quasi because it is at times fictional, though not gratuitously so—this is realist poetry at its core with the fantastical trimmings of dark fairy tales. Poison apples, onions bitten into like apples, cruel love and cruelly forbidden love lace her world with menace: “acid pinches her cheeks / and she tastes the Russian soldier / bitter shame spreading / in her mouth, down her throat / into her stomach / where vile heat pushes its way up” (69).
The narrative poems quickly telescope to present tense, after the past tense of the first few poems, placing us directly in the unfolding action. Fairy tales frame Marta’s childhood and the arrival of a cruel stepmother hints at the darkness to come into her life. We learn that Marta grew up in a time when adults would tell children they were too young to listen to the radio, as during WWII the radio brought reports of death and terror. In the poem “Her Name — June 1940,” young Marta practices a new spelling of her name in case she should need to blend in: “a perfect h, perfectly spaced / between the t and the a // joining both letters as if it belonged in case it is needed” (28).
These small moments—a girl practicing spelling her name—capture the dread of war until all sense of familial normalcy is broken. When Marta and her family are arrested for reasons unknown to Marta in 1941, she suffers a terrifying separation that results in her travelling alone to Siberia. Atkinson uses an incredible image of abandoned beetroot flashing across sheets of dark soil to depict the abandonment that racks Marta on this trip.
What follow are poems that dazzle like the worst of nightmares, as in “Bread,” where women and children scrabble to grab mouldy bread tossed to the floor by someone who imagines he is being kind: “green fluff sticking / to out-stretched tongues / dry as bone” (34).
Marta arrives in a camp in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she volunteers and gathers with other women in the community centre to sew, which becomes a life-long talent. This skill shows up later in the collection, the Canada years, in an impressively versatile contrapuntal poem, “The Quiet Years,” which pays homage to the patchwork quilt.
Atkinson’s attention to the sonic effect of each line startles and sets The Marta Poems apart. One example of many that struck me was when Marta wonders “if this is how insomnia starts. Dreams raw from war, starvation and loss. She keens for pink to rise through the open window” [bolded words my own emphasis] (46). These inversions are delightful to the brain.
A break from our isolated reality saturated by social media communication, The Marta Poems opens a portal into personal and world history that feels intimate in an analog, emotional way, brought to life with the attention of a poet who makes both the subject’s interiority and the sensory mosaic of international gardens, trains, and busy streets spring up all at once.
Margo LaPierre is an award-winning queer, bipolar Canadian poet, editor, and author of Washing Off the Raccoon Eyes (Guernica Editions, 2017). She is Arc Poetry Magazine’s newsletter editor and member of poetry collective VII. Her work has been published in Room, Arc, filling Station, CAROUSEL, carte blanche, PRISM, and others. Find her on Twitter @margolapierre.