Book Review On Froth, by Jarosław Mikołajewski
Published by Calypso Editions
Jarosław Mikołajewski’s collection of poetry Froth, translated into English by Piotr Florczyk is a playful tangled and tender humored love story. Mikołajewski was born in 1960 in Warsaw, Poland. He is poet, translator, essayist, short story author, and journalist. His ten volumes of poetry have been translated into Italian, German, Hebrew, and Greek. This is Mikołajewski’s first book of poetry to be translated into English. In this exposing blueprint we whisper in quotidian terms, in transcendence, and intimacy the masculine as it embodies the complexities of father, of lover, and husband. The love between the husband and wife stays complicit regardless of the transformation. How is immortality here outside of earth placed into family? It is in the exigency that we celebrate in the seconds of everyday life; in humor, in times of grandeur and the destitute grappling of placing a ponytail into a hair tie.
Self-alienation occurs when the speaker jumps into linear yet nonlinear juxtaposition. The place of self is disembodied if not only for a number, or letter, eluding, “my step – does it let you sleep and this letter.” When we begin the speaker can only physically internalize his dead father who is cast as hero; inhaling his captured breath in the plastic ribs of a regularly used air mattress. The music indelibly distances a sort of forced caesura: “rome is silent and I think so is the rest of the world.” But masculinity transforms. Development within this composition begins to illuminate colorful affects when we read about the speaker’s wife. Wife quantitates independence. In the poem “my wife’s spine,” soft tonal elements blend “her spine is a scarf / tightened around a slender neck” with raw “animal love” twisting around a “steel rope of the highest voltage.” This is similar to the way that he speaks of his daughters such as “tallow froth stayed behind,” “a scream twisted its mouth / it didn’t flat away,” finally admitting, “my liquid skeleton lay at my feet.” Humor transposes an ephemeral dissonance that is reinforced by an enlightened female body.
We traverse to a primal focus on the body of his wife “between earth and not.” Her body is given a planetary command in force and openness. Earth which is traditionally negotiated as the feminine is initially ridiculed: “I throw her fruit / she yells … feed me with yourself.” While the children plead, “don’t do it,” the wife pleads, “do something about her.” At times the fatherly rhetoric is pulled into dimensions of self-deprivation where isolated aspects of father are mere manure in comparison to the fortitude of dominating female figures. The speaker tries to identify with the family in a space of nonidentity, yearning to grasp and or identify cross-generational and cultural gaps. But there is no resentment and finally we hear from, “white mom,” where the distinct title “mom” is given to his mother. The speaker’s mother represents another aspecting self where identity remembers the hushaby. Following, “hushaby hushaby mom / but so that I can hear,” the mother’s ascension is a lullaby different from the planetary movement of lover, child, parent, and fruition. Mother is peaceful masculinity in song.
At rest the book ends in a confessional titled, “question.” We read, “I was not a creation, but my senses, oh yes there was no me / but you were already the creator.” The focus, while the hero began as the dead stale plastic air of father, is no longer trapped. His wife is creator: as not mother, or planet or lover, but one who triumphs the ecological embrace of the feminine. This is a love confession to his wife. He reflects on how he would live if his family died in a plane crash saying, “At first I would mourn our children,” but to she her death would “seep” in. He says, “the second the one who would die from you / would be dying very slowly.” The seeming fear of death is not one situated around dying. Not the traditional masculine fear of the body that one would initially perceive, but rather, masculinity displayed in his love for his wife as whole. He will die yes, but in love intact; this assumes his immortality.
Jillian Mukavetz is a poet artist musician founder and editor of womens quarterly conversation. she received her mfa from new england college. her poems and photography have appeared in delirious hem, barnstorm, otoliths, ditch, poets and artists, among other publications. her cinepoem was screened at the 2011 cinepoetry festival at the henry miller library in big sur and published in prick of the spindle. she plays the fiddle and has performed with ambrose bye and anne waldman as well as eleni sikelianos. she has a chapbook forthcoming in spring of 2013 from Dancing Girl Press. jillian currently lives in south korea as an english teacher.