Erna Ķikure — Selected Poems
Erna Ķikure is well known to Latvian readers. Her short stories, poems and plays have been published in the Latvian migrant press. A collection of her short stories Mūsu Kaimiņš (“Our Neighbour”) was published in 1962 and her correspondence with the well-known Latvian writer Jānis Sarma Ķikures un Sarmas Vēstules (“The Letters of Ķikure and Sarma”) in 1982. Her finest writing, however, has been her verse and here is a selection of some of her poetry.
Erna Ķikure grew up in pre-war Latvia where she studied art and music and gained recognition in both these fields. When she turned to writing it was a synthesis of all three talents – and produced powerful and highly original prose and poetry. Her fate as a post-war migrant in an alien land provided the catalyst. She found herself with two young daughters, on a small and unsuccessful farm in Australia, tied to the never-ending chores. Her music and art were denounced as “frivolities”. In these circumstances, poetry and prose became her silent conspirators – a source of both sustenance and pain: she wrote in total isolation, in precious, unpredictable, stolen moments.
Jānis Sarma found her earliest poems to be works of astounding maturity and advised her not to read other verse, but to rely on herself instead.
What is remarkable, in view of the circumstances which gave birth to her writing, is that her work is not a lament, not nostalgia for a lost past. It is always a confirmation and celebration of the life she sees about her in all its manifestations. The Australian continent, which to many Latvians at that time seemed so alien, inspired and sustained Erna Ķikure – the Australian bush, the black snake, the magpie, the surf, the farm, are her world. Just at the time when she might have viewed these surroundings as her prison, her themes, her language, her images and prose rhythms are those of a modern Australian writer.
The Surfboard Rider
On the peak of a charging wave,
below heaven, above the waters,
that form – rising, sinking,
is it human or divine?
In the white foam,
in the deep green troughs,
the bronze form
shatters into a hundred images.
A hundred terrors are lurking,
every instant charged with dread.
Isn’t the water blackening with blood?
The green board lolling like a lizard’s tongue…
Away Satan! Dread is for the old!
That form blazing in the sun,
full of vigour,
on the peak of a charging wave
is human and divine.
When her elder daughter Inese began her studies at Sydney University, Erna Ķikure accompanied her and left her farm (the setting of her first collection of short stories) forever. Six years later, she revisited Europe with Inese, who, returning via Canada, decided to settle there. In the meantime, her younger daughter Dzidra (whose work also appears in this book) settled in Sydney, after six years spent in England. Europe inspired in Ķikure a series of poems – “Joys of Travel”; Australia remained her home-base. Recently, Canada, with its climactic similarity to Latvia, provides a new source of inspiration.
Her poetry has always been a joy to read and re-read. But suddenly the poetry of the last few years takes the reader by surprise: its power and confidence delight as never before. For the first time we have poems recalling her homeland, including: There and First Ice. The first gives a picture of her happy childhood, of the family from whom she parted so suddenly, unexpectedly, and finally, on fleeing Latvia.
There
On Sundays she spread a white cloth (linen threaded),
and we gathered happily at the breakfast table.
Around us the dew-steeped garden, tranquil and green,
the yard, fields, road, forest;
the river Aiviekste sporting with tiny waves
which reflected on the walls – invitingly,
and the clock with a flash of gold pendulum,
slowly struck the morning hour.
But time did not stand still.
“Now then – hurry along, get ready…”
called her voice as she cleared the table
And so we have been – hurrying, getting ready, until this very day.
The site of Erna Ķikure’s home on the banks of the Aiviekste is one of the most beautiful parts of Latvia. Was it the memory of the happy, calm, ordered family shown in this poem at Sunday breakfast – that dew, garden, yard, field, road, forest and her favourite river – which have for all these years given her the strength to see new beauty, to accept and celebrate it in her poetry, in the midst of loss and hardship? This is confirmed in her Letters. Moreover, the name of her home is her nom de plume: Ķikure.
First Ice
When on the brown leaves
I feel the first signs of ice,
my heart leaps at the promise
of winter joys.
I feel as though I must once again
harness the old bay
and return home
from my long sojourning.
I harness up
with knots deft and tight
and try to divine
where North and South once lay.
For a long time now
I’ve been getting ready,
attiring myself for the journey
not knowing where my rig might take me.
When beneath my feet
I feel the first ice
I stop where the four roads meet.
And instead
I send a message with the migrating birds –
it seems to me that they too
are now heading northwards towards morning.
This has the quality of a vivid dream, leaping to life with each returning winter. It is significant that the opening two lines of the first two stanzas recall the rhythm of a traditional folk-song. The theme of longing for one’s native place is recurrent in Latvian folk tradition, as the country has been ruled by “foreign masters” for most of its history. Not a single word in the poem jars one from the folk-dream, and yet, when we look closely, the poem is entirely hers. The brown leaves (not silver) and the joys of early winter ice (not spring, not gentle snow) are being celebrated. She feels she must harness not the handsome, trusty or frisky colt, but the old bay (grown old because she has overstayed her visiting?). She still remembers the knots deft and tight for the harness, but she needs to divine where North and South once lay. These deliberately everyday words keep the poem firmly in her control. These words also ensure that this is not a song of nostalgia. She keeps the Canadian ice beneath her feet and the land and its seasons are giving Erna Ķikure a new lease of energy and creative power.
Austra Graudiņš, Canberra.
Re-discovered and Re-created
Most immediately striking in the work of Erna Ķikure are surprising departures from the expectable. Her verse, although at times echoing folk rhythms (in a sense acknowledging them), does not follow them.1 It does not conform to traditional structure. It is contemporary in content, form and language. Her innovations have little to do with any conscious effort at experimentation, either for its own sake or for the wish to be seen as part of an “avant-garde“. They stem, rather, from a search for authentic expression by a “living being in our time”, as her best critic, K. Freimanis, has described her.
This search has led to a verse form which has been likened to prose poetry. It resembles English “free verse” and has similar basis in the natural, spoken rhythm of the language. It results from a sensitivity to the subtle configurations contained within the very structure of the language, to rhythms not quite the same as those of speech and prose, which become justifications for the elusive shift to poetry.
Ķikure’s language is rich and current. She is not afraid to go beyond the traditional. She incorporates, when needed, “foreign” words to express an experience which could not be as accurately conveyed in traditional terms. Her language corresponds to a life which has crossed not only national and geographical borders, but also philosophical, cultural and conceptual borders. Any one language governs, limits and shapes the very thoughts possible in it. It does so not only through the historical connotations of words, but through the actual linguistic structures available, which determine what can be imagined. Ķikure escapes some of these constraints and is able to give new and contemporary, often unexpected, nuances to words and expressions coined and fixed at some earlier, “purer” time.
Her initial training in music and printmaking has remained alive in a continued and passionate interest in contemporary work in the performing and visual arts. She is well-read in current literature in several languages. She plays the piano daily. She is an acute observer-critic of visual expression. These pursuits combine to give her a resource of knowledge, mastery and precision which is rare. Clear, attentive observation is transformed through skilful crafting into an expression as incisive and rich as the lines of an etching. Translation of her work, despite assiduous effort, has failed to reproduce this fullness.
The well-known composers E. Freimanis and E. Māršaus have set some of Erna Ķikure’s verse to music. The music contained in the poetry itself is not of the predictable variety of rhymes, rhythmic beat, onomatopoeiae and sound repetitions. It is based instead on the already mentioned sensitivity to the rhythms inherent in ordinary speech. The underlying structure parallels musical composition. The poet develops and elaborates themes of content with words, the way a musician constructs phrases with notes. Lines of verse, often repeated only at the end, are like refrains. Sometimes they are variations on themes, sometimes not. They gather associations, are enriched in significance, and leave an opening for further reverberation and expansion.
For Ķikure the senses are vital perceptors. S. Silkalna has commented on the poet’s use of colour, and traced it to her visual artist’s sensibility.2 So, it is not surprising that she has an acute understanding of the effect of colour and uses it with ease and accuracy. Equally important are smell and touch, most often used in the Proustian sense of unleashers of memory. The references are seldom explained. It is not a case of comparison. A eucalyptus smell is not like something else. It simply is, and is very particular. For those who know it, it will evoke a whole atmosphere, and almost always suggest heat of a distinctive flat kind. The description of a specific moment is exact.
Particular time and place always infer a defined cultural context, which can, however, become multi-layered. The white linens, flowers and a certain “sound of silence” implied at festive times in Northern Europe, link with the bell-shaped jacaranda blossoms in Australia, in their luminous profusion on trees and thick-carpeted below, to enrich the meaning of festivity as special sanctified time. So, perhaps there are hidden metaphors, or at least layers of association, which derive their connotations from several cultural sources. And always, there is the implication of the more ancient significance of “special occasions” to mark the changing rhythms of seasons and other cycles, and to acknowledge their mystery and to celebrate their renewal.
Ķikure rejects, consciously, the notion that poetry must speak of some greater beauty and grandeur, must strive for some imagined ideal. She returns always to direct experience, perceived with intelligence and sensitivity, and grounds herself in the belief that perhaps the here and now is the only truly knowable. She is wary of received ideas and ready-made conclusions. She needs to test them for their authenticity by living and experiencing them. Even the undercurrent of more ancient beliefs, the echo of an earlier more earth-bound mysticism, has to survive the test of the “here and now”. This alert, meticulous scrutiny ensures integrity and freshness in her expression. It rings true and is therefore a source of particular power.
Thus, her philosophy embodies a conviction that anything of importance in any eternal sense has to be re-discovered, re-created, re-presented through diligent, sensuous (with all the senses active and alive) observation of the present, ever changing and ever the same. Perhaps that is all there is, ever has been or will be. Yet, something is added to the sum total of our understanding. J. Sarma, her colleague, mentor and friend, has noted that what one feels “between the lines” of Ķikure’s work goes beyond the everyday described.3 She does not tell us how to look. She looks, with flair and presence, and then, celebrates the fact that she can.
Ķikure’s handling of content suggests a possible comparison with Haiku – a form with which she is not familiar. There is a similar depiction of a brief, personal moment, situated in a particular time and season, in a specific place, often in nature. It is a moment which expands its flash of illumination to a larger, more impersonal insight and comment on the “human condition.” This insight is not elaborated. There is a gap, where the mind makes a connecting leap. The poet presents a word picture of one event in its happening, where emotions felt are evoked, not described. Elements are presented without any statement of cause and effect. A new and further meaning emerges from the juxtapositions, through internal comparisons, through suggestion. The more general implication is what makes the work relevant, makes it a source of wisdom.
Her references to nature are most Haiku-like. Her poetry is not about Nature. She uses nature as a grounding point: a suggestion of both the eternally solid, beyond man (though including him), and the ever fragile, transitory and changing, in its specific manifestations. Nature is a consolation, but also a constant reminder of impermanence. There is no intimation of conflict between these two aspects. On the contrary, she finds comfort in and draws strength from the inevitability of the cycle. It is evidence of a truth beyond one’s capacity to unravel its contradictions. This is not a romantic vision of a caring, protecting Mother Nature. Nature does not “care” in any way about one’s existence. Nor is it “cruel and harsh” with any intention, as might the Australian extremes of it appear to a European. It simply co-exists. Understanding this, the poet can embrace it with an unconditional acceptance and an unsentimental allegiance.
At times, her descriptions of nature form a translucent smoke-screen to hide and reveal her own emotions. She does not attribute these to Nature. Her references then function as a displacement, a kind of concealed, indirect way of conveying what she has to say. There seems to be a hope that the “receiver” (a specific, known “other”, usually not the the public reader) will get the message, will decipher the code, will read and understand the secret wish – a wish, which cannot, dare not, be openly expressed. It is a coded eluding of some hostile presence, some threatening, watchful guard. Who?
A sense of oppression, a wish for freedom, permeates some of her works. It originates seldom in the predictable political, social, outside circumstances. It speaks, rather, of the binds and limitations of our own selves, the misunderstandings, the not-quite-communications. It is a challenge even to the physical body, container and constrainer of a spirit which rebels. It is, finally, the expression of a tremendous energy and will to live, fully, this very life, with its pain as well as its joy. Others have described it as her “celebration of life”, a reaffirmation of life as it is. It is not an escape from it to some other ideal, not a freedom from it, but a freedom to participate most fully in it. If there were the possibility of a choice at the end, a wish to be granted, it would be to live it all again! (A comparison here to Camus’ Meursault in L’Étranger is not inappropriate.)
Much of Ķikure’s work refers to the ongoing choices, made to the best of one’s ability or imposed by circumstances beyond one’s control – the turning-points, the shifts, often imperceptible at the time, which change and form an individual destiny. Some works look back, with a later consciousness, at those decisions. They reveal a keen awareness of how fortuitous, how little realized at the time, were the subtle switches of direction which altered the rest of a life. These moments are ever recurring. There is a poignancy in the realization, a poignancy imbued with wonder and surprise, that those choices and moments, carelessly lived, add up to a life. That that is how it happens.
Inese Birstiņš, Montreal.
1 Folk songs and poems are particularly important in Latvian culture. Over a million of them have now been collected and recorded and are beginning to be studied and analyzed in their function as the principal carriers, orally transmitted, of the collective culture, history, religion and belief of the people. They date back some four thousand years.
2 S. Silkalna, “Kompleksā krāsainība,” Latvija 29 July, 1985.
3 J. Sarma, “Vienreizības skaistums,” Austrālijas Latvietis 9 May, 1959.