The Shores of Vaikus

Author: Philip Gross

Our Friend Philip Gross’s latest collection, his twenty-eighth book, begins and ends with meditations on, among other things, silence. Between these two sections, entitled ‘Translating Silence’, we meet the prose-poetry of Evi and The Devil. 

he book’s epigraph, from Estonian poet Juhan Viiding, signals our journey:

    in the cage of your heart there is silence

    and a thousand-year-old bird

    it can speak  however  it loves you 

    so it never says a word.

The Shores of Vaikus is based on Gross’s relationship with his father’s homeland of Estonia. For over thirty years Gross has visited this small and fragile country, learning its living memory of occupations, mass deportations and armies rolling over it. In the middle section of the book, the prose-poems of Evi and the Devil, we meet a different voice, one that Gross has said came as a surprise to himself. He adds that while ‘Evi teases and fabulates, there are real bodies in the forest, real disappearances and unexploded shells.’

Now in the midst of the Ukraine war, these poems move close to the reader in real and raw ways. Estonia is back on a fault line; Russia may feel empowered to reassert its control over the three little Baltic states. 

 In the first poem ‘The Old Country’, we meet a wasp, making layers of inwardness. The reader is alerted to Teresa of Avila’s interior castles, how ‘word-of-mouth’ might ‘recollect itself into something almost weightless.’ This is also a quality these poems locate in Estonian culture, one positively valued, as is quietness and reticence. 

We are given visions of a wreck ‘beneath the ice through which a portal gives a strange version of a table laid…’ where, ‘there might be music playing, if we could be still enough.’ 

It may be that what the poet ultimately wants to share with the reader is ‘Not silence, so much / as the larger voice / of things.’ The apparent place-name Vaikus is, we learn, one of the several words for silence in Estonian, or ‘holding one’s peace’

 The poems play in paradox: inside and outside, elsewhere and here. We are told, ‘Inside here: elsewhere. Inside elsewhere: here.’ We learn how ‘a deliberation of raindrops / from a house you will no longer / find on any street’ reveal ‘the memories you never had.’ The first and final sections offer little parables of gnosis: of longing for present absences.

In the sequence entitled ‘Erratics’ we meet a boulder like ‘a 10,000-year-old child gazing homeward.’ On this coastline: 

    stillness which is anything 

    but static: slow, wide, bay-wide swell, too slight 

    to notice.

The tone is serious, not solemn; the schist of mica rock holds in it ‘a night-sky-dumpling, its thousands stars / glittering, on, off, as you walk around it.’ But we are asked to imagine ‘the grief of magma expelled from earth’s core.’ We meet ‘Metsamunk, the Forest Monk, the Hermit’, the great erratic boulder which asks us ‘to absorb its licheny stare.’

In a place of last things, buildings and beaches, we are made to feel how we may be made up of lastnesses. We are told ‘To go, to turn back, or to stay forever. You have, you always have, a choice.’

In a landscape where 6,000 years is nothing, where islands were seabeds, horizons can be mirage, ‘like a dotted line between the real and the unreal, / with an instruction: tear here.’

Moving away from the shores, ‘Evi and The Devil’ is the book’s hinterland, and we are steeped in a landscape which seems to hold a kind of peace. 

‘We will be transformed by our meetings with the strange beings in this text.’

Now, though, we meet ‘the Devil who squats, grandly, to fart. Things wither.’ Soon, though, people build in the clearings. The Devil, in Estonian folklore, is strong but clumsy, and easily fooled, like conquerors and masters of all kinds. Just when we think this may be quaint folklore, we’re told ‘This isn’t a story, this is history.’

And so as readers we learn heavy things lightly. In a corner of the woods lives the Glass Man. ‘I’m almost sure I’ve seen him now and then – sometimes a slight quirk in the field of vision, sometimes a thin prismatic glint like the edge of a mirror…’

This dream world wants us to learn the truth of visions and visionary truths.

‘There’s a small lake of silence – OK, I mean a large pool, really, in the heart of the woods. I thought everyone knew that, but gradually I realised that none of my classmates did...’

While the truths of these forests may be dark with deportations and disappearances, there are other creatures here, like swans which teach that human existence is relative, in both senses of that word. Relative in that we are related to all beings and relative by being placed in the midst of eons of perspective. This writer allows us the sort of perspective that we as human beings need right now in times of climate and political meltdowns and upheavals.

We meet children who are given the lessons of history from adults who themselves are ‘too shrill, too brittle, they might shatter, splinters everywhere.’ We are told, ‘some terribly blond people once, (came) through here /with ideals and uniforms, and a loathing of darkness.’

In these stories, Evi reveals how a bout of childhood measles or mumps guides her ‘into a world that sits inside and yet is larger than our own.’ 

The voice of these poems, a bit like the Christ poet, understands the need to be a child ‘laughing, barelegged and swinging in the tree of knowledge’ though Evi is equally the Trickster, and can be dangerous at times. Perhaps the poet, like the best of his tribe of bards, wants to guide us into vision. And to be a seer, we in some ways will be baptised by fire. If we as humans are to learn anything from history we must be a bit like the oldest person in the village, ‘young Aare’s baby. Nothing shocks him. He has seen it all before.’ Like all true experience, we will be transformed by our meetings with the strange beings in this text.

Evi, the ‘feral mudscuffler’, runs by the rippling clean ice edges of silence, leading us into new realms, where ‘the crack in the surface of things’ disrupts normal perception. We are invited to glimpse that which is so ‘shutter-quick we cannot un-see what we have seen’. 

To live adventurously may be to read deeply and freely into a word-world where ‘The Devil is a postman. Comes round with his sack of letters from the whole wide world, his world…’ Poor Devil, he reappears in steadily less and less grand form as time goes on, reduced in the end to a humble, harassed bureaucrat.

One of the gifts of standing on The Shores of Vaikus is that we can drop in and out of these parables that make up the heart of the collection. Yet do not be fooled, for all of the quixotic moments, ‘It is deep, here in this wood of words…’

The poems in which ‘a cuckoo calls once in an endless hall of pines and is everywhere…’ ask to be read and re-read. In the echoes and murmurations of this collection, we hear ‘the small voice that says, bend, bend.’ In this non-binary world, I am encouraged by the thought: ‘A few of us break but we bend.’

Towards the end of the book, in ‘A Monument in Vaikus’, the poet is reading the names of a grandfather who died in a Soviet labour camp in the Urals and several uncles only returned from deportation half a lifetime later, from the memorial which leads to ‘Apple trees, / new-planted. Four lines of a poem / and ten thousand silver, individual bees. ‘The murmur of a beehive is a synonym in sound / for silence.’ As geese fly, we hear ‘the grandest act of quiet…’

Maybe the point was never for us humans to be fluent in silence. Yet Gross asks us to consider what words are, and what it might mean truly to listen. 

He acknowledges a hard truth with tact and kindness:

    it would be 

    (in a way that in this 

    life we never are) entirely heard. 

Alongside his extraordinary yet historically based imaginative quest, he gives us glimpses which allow the reader to centre. For sharing a lifetime of seeing and feeling, and for honing and polishing the lens of his vision/craft, we can be deeply grateful. 

    As if there might be a chance, when 

    all of the outside world 

    (can be) focused inward.

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Comments

My thanks for this hugely open-hearted, thoughtful and attentive review – the kind of engaged reading any book of poetry would hope for.
I ought to add, apologetically, that the book won’t actually be published until 21st November, though if Dana’s fine review sparks an urge to impulse-buy, I’m sure Bloodaxe Books will take advanced orders online.

By Philip & Zelie on 12th September 2024 - 15:18

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