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Book
Review
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Helleborus
& Alchémille Translation
by Stéphanie Roesler
Elana Wolff’s bilingual collection of poems is drawn from four of her previously published works: Birdheart, Mask, You Speak to Me in Trees and Startled Night. A felicitous arrangement in English and French of 34 poems, it resonates with the music of words, a wide-ranging sensitivity to the natural world and an acuity of perception leavened with a sense of irony – disparate elements blended into a spiritual alchemy in the face of evanescent life. Hence the title Helleborus & Alchémille, two plants valued by alchemists of old for their mystical and curative properties. The first segment Birdheart demonstrates the fusion between the artist and nature. In the eponymous poem Birdheart « …Tenacious as the moss / and rocks and water,/ here I am. In nature…/ I’d gladly be the yellow finch,/.…a birdheart so compact and small, / it leaves no room for sorrow. » In the segment Mask, images borrowed from nature, as well as a tincture of melancholy, inhabit her poetry as the poet parses the shifting states of love. In Cabbage, the poet uses the lowly vegetable to startling and ironic effect to illustrate the anguish of lost love : « …hard green orb /as hub /of mysterious love./ Whenever I hew a head in two, I feel the spook / of amour at my back, gazing down at the nape / of my neck with the same knife-like precision. » In the third and fourth segments, the reader is allowed a more intimate glimpse of domestic life, of travels, of feelings, of gardens at once personal and philosophical. In an ironic twist, the poem Eden is transposed to the poet’s own garden :« Snakes have never been seen here./The notion of complicity / is accepted nevertheless. » Several prose poems are interwoven in these last two sections and the closing prose poem Art Sometimes Makes Me Vague provides a powerful and touching exploration of the myth of the Phoenix with its intimations of death and rebirth. The French component of Helleborus & Alchémille has been admirably realised. Stéphanie Roesler is to be commended for her excellent rendering in French of complex poetry, ideas and tonalities. The harmony of the bilingual text is exemplified in the poem Alchemilla : « The shimmer myth,/ imbibed to heighten life and fetter fears,/ is folded in the creases of her cloak.» « Le mythe chatoyant,/ absorbé pour vivre mieux / et repousser les peurs, / repose dans les recoins de sa cape.” Both the English and French versions stand in elegant juxtaposition. Elana Wolff`s Helleborus & Alchémille is finely honed and vibrant, lyrical and mystical, witty and ironic, a celebration of life with elegiac undertones - the product of an accomplished poet. Extraordinary and highly recommended Go
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