BOOKS
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Often, the most effecting poems are the ones that enfold the political
message in figuration, as in Arp,id farkas's beautiful prose poem, "Dur–
ing the Ablutions of Old Men."
In
the homiest trope imaginable–
men bathing-the poem conveys the tenacity of the grime accumulated
by the century's horrors, and the abiding need for purification. Playing
on images of men washing both in public baths and in the privacy of
their own yards or homes, the language, like the water it mimics, flows
torrentially without pause and little punctuation to depict "the old men
with their legs spread, with john-the-baptist dignity bending over the
tin-plated wash bowl, that's how they wash up, as if it were for the last
time they were washing up." The poet's eye pans lovingly across details
of "shriveled-up palms"; the water "glistens in the gullies of their
faces"; and "they don't bother wrapping a towel around their waists,
the water sprays on their trousers." The middle of the poem begins to
superimpose a second set of images:
from hehind the curtain of falling rinse water the images of their
bending so often over three-quarters of a century emerge, bending
to pick up a stick from the ground,
to
scoop up some drinking
water fr0111 a brook, that's how they bent over the brook standing
on the shores of Irtysh or Tisza, with the bayoneted rifles leaning
against a bush, when stumbling bent over in a headlong chase of
the encmy or clse on the run away from it, scorching the earth, and
sniffing it as the)' wiped off the blood
The poems in
I
Rell1ain
bring
to
American eyes important, politically
astute, and aesthetically adroit work that's existed too long in the
halflight of political oppression. Aside from their verbal felicities, the
works edify by inviting the reader to participate in a consciousness gen–
erous enough to identify the individual with the century, wise enough to
find home in the ground beneath one's feet.
Gyorgyi Voros
