Zen
Mercies Small Satoris
by Marianne Bluger,
published by Penumbra Press, 2005
***
There is no room for error
in the tight world of the tanka, and so I opened Marianne Bluger’s latest book
with keen anticipation.
There is plenty of fine
writing in this spare and modest collection.
For Bluger, tanka are “little epiphanies” and “moments of heightened
awareness.” True; but her poems also
have a curiously expansive quality:
On our way
to the shore – a wasp
flies in
& down the road a mile
out again
A simple image; but it
recalls Bede likening life to a sparrow flying in and out of a Saxon mead-hall
on a winter night. Her tanka is modern,
however - the car is in motion, so that the wasp, involuntarily, exits far from
its point of entry. Add to this forced dislocation an implied sense of
entrapment and danger, and the travellers’ own progress towards their
destination, and you have a passably complex statement. Many of the tanka have
that quality.
Trips are a major theme for
Bluger. However, the poet’s larger, over-arching voyage is her battle with
cancer, and the book relates that narrative.
The first section begins with glimpses of daily life, often laced with
wry humour:
Testing
that theory again:
the drunker I get
the clearer
shines the moon
The second section continues
in a similar vein, referring as well to family relations. Next come travel
pieces, a sequence on writing, tanka on the death of her father, and travel
again. Suddenly the tone darkens in “The Heat,” with a sense of nostalgia,
foreboding, and loss. That unease explodes into naked terror in “A Plunge of
Sky,” with the opening haiku:
Eyes widening
in the dark – my spine
arched
in agony I touch
the root of madness
In this section, Bluger
grapples with the ultimate challenge – facing death with courage. Fear gives way to wonder at the beauty of
nature and to memories:
Awakened by pain
in a hospital room –
my hometown
in the moonlight
fresh snow has fallen
and to an irrepressible
intelligence:
Poor woman
weeping to hear my case
is terminal
doesn’t know how I am:
basically curious
Once home, the poet writes:
It’s dawn
beached by light
the survivor
gapes up at the moving
clouds to learn
Throughout the eighth and
ninth sections, Bluger describes her home life with clarity and poignancy. The
poems attain a rare intensity in speaking of the preciousness of marriage and
home, the strains imposed by illness, and the naturalness of death.
After dwelling briefly on
correspondence with soulmates in Japan, Bluger continues, serenely, to chronicle
the final stages of her illness.
The last section in Zen
Mercies contains some of the most moving poetry I know. The author has abandoned fear, turning
instead to a profound sense of unity with nature. Here are just three of the
texts:
Something
inside me cascades
with that willow
trailing chartreuse fronds
in the swollen stream
***
Willows
bending in wind
& my blown mind
becoming that
rolling cloud pond
***
I am being
blown slowly away
my bones
washed clean
in a river of wind
These
tanka bring to a close an astonishing tour de force: Bluger has created a narrative of rock-solid strength and
profundity with the wispiest of texts.
The book’s value lies not in technical virtuosity, though it has that;
it is the spiritual message and human story that count. The ephemeral moments of daily life give
rise to universal truths while continuing to support and nourish them. That, surely, is poetry at its best.