Ewa Chrusciel, Yours, Purple Gallinule

 

Tiny Throat Diagnoses

I have been listening to you, dear loon.

I hear in your trilling a melancholy.
you inherited melancholy from your grandparents. How do you
regulate the states of your system? Neurotransmitters? How do you
restore your humoral equilibrium?

The point – entelechy? A relationship between real and potential,
with astonishment of feathers.

I’m fascinated by New Hampshire-based Polish-American poet and translator Ewa Chrusciel’s latest full-length poetry title in English, her Yours, Purple Gallinule (Omnidawn, 2022). Following her prior English-language collections (she also has three collections published in Polish) Strata (Emergency Press, 2009; Omnidawn, 2018), Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Of Annunciations (Omnidawn, 2017) [see my review of such here], Yours, Purple Gallinule is a book of birds, illnesses and depictions; a book of vertigo, pneumonia, diagnoses and mental aviaries, as well as a variety of temporal spaces. “In the meantime,” she writes, as part of the poem “Tiny Throat Diagnoses,” “the larks rolled like scrolls around the pins of their / own laughter. What were they laughing about? They were simply / disciples of joy.” There is an opening of time beyond what we know into the knowledge of birds, from Hildegard of Bingen to Thomas Jefferson, and translations from the Middle Ages to the narrator’s “80-year-old dad [who] visits from his native country.” (“Acts of Exile”).

To speak of birds, at least in Chrusciel’s hands, is to speak of perpetual memory and endurance through the complex and woven structures of fragment, short bursts, diagnoses, declarations and documentation. The poems of Yours, Purple Gallinule offer a collection that echoes John James Audobon’s Birds of America (1827-1838), but if birds were studied as a way to examine, also, the intellectual, ecological and emotional healthy of all life on earth, centred around that binary of birds and human. To heal the world one must first articulate the symptoms, in order to diagnose the illness. And, one might ask, are Chrusciel’s narrators the birds themselves? As the poem “And not to spill a single grain” ends:

Like the centrifugal leaps
of my mothers neurons
make her grasp the inscape
of things.
One needs to be an oracle
to hear an oracle.