'You may find that reading the poems is too painful and I do sympathise.' Photo: Cover of We Speak Crisis Here, by Violet White
We Speak Crisis Here, by Violet White
Author: Violet White. Review by Voirrey Faragher
This small pamphlet of poems is remarkable. I commend it to any Friend who feels deeply the wounds we witness and experience in the world. White speaks from the heart of the intense suffering in our world, and of unbearable and unthinkable atrocities. She lays them before us in poetic form. We cannot look away, cannot avert our eyes from the tragedies which unfold before us. Try ‘Ears to hear’: ‘If you listened / to the keening of the Earth / you would be smitten; / pity would enlarge you. / But you were still listening for the bodies / falling at your feet.’
The first poem of the collection, ‘Fallout’ is about Norman Morrison, a Quaker who immolated himself in November 1965 on the steps of the Pentagon as a protest against the Vietnam war. It looks at the aftermath from the perspective of his family: ‘They said that / hearts leapt in those flames, / fused a peculiar hope / as grief affirmed coalesced / It was bringing it back home. / Incarnate. One loss. One flesh. / A people unknown become kin. / Living your life in grafted skin.’
You may find that reading the poems is too painful and I do sympathise. I have experienced images which revisit the mind uninvited and cause anguish. ‘Red Tape’, on the Grenfell fire, says: ‘Where the skeletal high rise remains, stark against the smoking sky, now strobe our eyeballs night and day, and 129 hearths scattering ashes of home are seared across the bloated skyline of our times.’
Despite horror, we are lifted by hope. White is a devout Christian socialist. Her collection is a testament to the dark and to the Light. She brings horrors to life but within this awful un-Godliness she brings uplifting stories of courage. ‘Testament from Guantanamo’ says: ‘Dying there, the one who was anonymous / was unease from world-end to us, / left dissonance just beneath the skin, / and the desert, burrowing deeper to lose despair, / scoured – once again – our cupped hearts.’
In the centre of the book is a ‘concrete’ poem shaped skilfully into a tree. It is a beautiful poem that describes ‘the unstoppable disruption’ of a man’s love for his land and his olive trees: ‘escapes the milling settlers, breaking their clutch – to fall to his knees, single eyed, tender, urgent, stretching his blessing full upon the land. He keeps nothing back, holding these cherished ancestral groves in eternal freedom.’
‘One Night’ is about the Christmas truce – a soldier in the mud sings of peace and goodwill: ‘As that sure light shafts the grim Nacht / with its Stille, its riveting clarity / piercing the dark arts fatally, / so that arrow-of-song are you / that you barely notice / the company you’ve enlisted / in that ambush on hatred /now sweeping / the battle lines before it, / trampling demarcation / in a most heavenly of earthly choirs.’
White writes with compassion to those who can bear to hear. She has an enduring hope that the world can change, and a belief that one small candle counts as Light.
