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Reflections of Anghelaki Rooke's poems by Merlie M. Alunan

I turned to Anghelaki Rooke's poem out of curiousity, and to learn--how do other poets respond to the life in these times?

I read these lines in her poetry (War Diary): "I found tonight on my pillow /A gift given to me by war:/ The insignificance of my death."

And in the next poem: "I wondered if the desert/ Rejects alien bodies/As our poor body does…/Night is falling; I am reading letters/From between the Wars: they correspond/ And kiss through words / Without knowing if they will ever meet / Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Rilke."

In still another poem, Lunch and Dinner, I found the poet talking about the everydayness of her life, while big things are going on beyond the periphery of her own existence.

“So, I said to my soul, leave aside the after-life of the imagination and concentrate on things of this life. What is born and destined to die requires a lot more care, attention and sacrifice than what is not yet born on paper and its genes contain immortality…But…oh! The milk over boiled…I left the food burn…I forgot to buy bread and now it is too late, the baker is closed."

I had to read this poem to understand where Anghelaki is coming from. From what aerie of the imagination does she speak and how am I to listen to her?" What faculties of thought and feeling does she want me to bring into her reading? This is as good as asking how do I enter into her imagination? When I read the above lines the woman speak, the intellectual woman pondering the terms of her own existence? How important is my life against the many lives wated by war around me? What startles in the poem is the stark simplicity of the statement--this is war's gift to me, the knowledge that my own death is as insignificant as the deaths that are happening all around me. But that is not what Anghelaki would like to say--every life is precious, just as I consider my own as a precious gift that war is turning ever more worthless as it goes on. This reversal of meaning is sudden, taking place in the reader's own mind, protesting the poet's words, yet at the same time empathizing to its truth and necessity.

Anghelaki perceives the perpetual tension between solid visible bodies and desire: the desert rejecting alien bodies is surely an expression of desire, not to accept what is given to it, but to be pure and inviolable, just as our bodies reject that which is not part of them, in the same manner that poets in the war write each other and kiss through letters, and feel fulfilled thereby. Despite the lack of touch, desire is fulfilled somehow. It is human destiny to grab his existence in these immutable tensions. In "Lunch and Dinner," the poet grapples with the mundane while conscious of the various pulls of divinity--art, poetry,song, legal questions, philosophical concerns versus, dailiness, "everydayness," as the poet says it, such as buying bread, watching the milk, etc. All these too, is good, is life. Nevertheless can one just shut off and turn away from where the heart pulls one away--to the invisible goals which are just as important to the human being, as essential to his existence as getting dinner.

When I read "Destiny Also Flows" I was struck by the opening lines: „At dawn the sea turns green like a meadow/ and you can see how the imperishable water /views the grass /how it conceives the partiality of the root /the bondage of the fruit." Hatto talks about it as the sea's vision of the land, grass, root, the bondage of the fruit. Even the sea has a sense of the land's destiny--to stay in place, to be rooted and bonded to the fruit while itself flows, imperishable but obviously flowing, transforming, becoming many different things while itself remaining impermeable, its stability grounded on this essential impermeability. Anghelaki's poetry is certainly grounded on ideas, ideas that find themselves intrinsically twined with our daily ways life. "I emerge from my sorrows," the poet says, "I don’t forget that under his nameless skin it is he alone who moves." It is an assurance that our implicit destiny is one with water, despite the cloddish solidity of our bodies.

Merlie M. Alunan

1.12.2012

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