Not the ocean but her bathtub

October 28, 2014 Her name is Yael Globerman and it’s been seven years between her debut volume, Alibi (2000), and her second, The Same River Twice (2007) [both from Helicon Press and both edited by Amir Or]. The wait was worth it. The two books form complementary parts of a mature poetic process. At the newer book’s launch, Globerman quoted a poet who said that ‘publishing a book of poems and waiting for a response is like tossing rose petals into the Grand Canyon and listening for an echo’. Here’s my reverberation from the canyon.
 
Globerman’s poetics may be found along two scales. On one, she sails between the element of land (signifying rescue) and that of water (drowning), and this last is the key to her work. The mediums of transmission [are] the elements of air (flight) and fire (burning). The second scale ranges from woman as seductress/ Lilith/ snake (the attractive mistress) to witch and on to a motherly woman (and her radicalization into a fatherly one). 
 
I’ll focus on the first scale. Globerman consistently treats the home [as a place] where, [as she says], ‘sleep is carried out’, [and] love, relationships, parenting. Water flows around all these subjects. Many waters threaten to drown the speaker, but Globerman’s innovation is her ability to prevent the flood waters from overwhelming her. Alibi consists of five sections. The first, ‘Map of the Peninsula’, opens this way: ‘The survivors arrived on the shore and made love/ under the clock tower. You/ were born on land’. Globerman integrates land and water, being swept away and surviving, lovemaking, parenting and time in these two lines. These are her building blocks.
 
In The Same River Twice, there are six sections. From the near drowning in Alibi Globerman moves on to flight, in ‘The Desk’:
 
Unlike Icarus, I am learning
to fly on my feet. Sometimes on all fours.
Still, the longing is one and the same:
to row with two revolving arms
closer to
a burning thing. (Tr. Vivian Eden)

The attempt to fly is doomed to fail from the start; while Icarus managed to fly before he fell, the speaker crashes before she can take off. Pay attention to her desire to ‘to row with two revolving arms’. Rowing is a natural movement in water. When Globerman uses the verb ‘revolving’ she depicts near drowning and not a movement of soaring upward. Later in the poem she reveals her location:
 
This island is made up of sharp fragments.
Things that were shipwrecked are building it,
but on it I can live.
I swim toward the jagged desk
grab hold and climb aboard. (Tr. Vivian Eden) 

And so, with an artist’s hand, Globerman returns us to swimming and being swept away, to the survivors and the map of the peninsula, the place where she can live. The only thing that manages to allow flight is her wooden life preserver (in every sense of the word) – her writing desk.
 
In both of her books, there is a powerful struggle not to drown and rather to swim to a safe harbor (land). The flight toward ‘a burning thing’ is an illusion. At the beginning of this review I alluded to the mothers of Hebrew poetry. Globerman conducts an attraction-aversion relationship with one of them, namely Dahlia Ravikovitch. They share a starting point – floods and the constant threat of drowning. Ravikovitch’s final book of poems is called, how fitting, Many Waters. The [eponymous] opening poem is entirely about drowning:
 
A ship
afloat with no anchor.
She does have a sail
but the sea has no wind.
The sea expands,
spills into the ocean.
. . . 
The captain despairs.
Jumps into the waters.
He’d rather drown.
. . . 
This ship
is the Dahlia Maria.
She will sink today,
she is sinking today. (Tr. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld)      

Dahlia Maria is the poet Dahlia Ravikovitch. Not only is she drowning, she seeks to do so. It is exactly at this point that Globerman leaves her. Ravikovitch surrenders, gives up on life, desires redeeming death. Globerman fights; she holds on to life and her desire is for it.
 
Let’s compare Ravikovitch’s Many Waters with The Same River Twice. Ravikovitch makes her intentions clear: deluge and drowning. Globerman goes in the opposite direction: Sisyphean diving. In the final poem of Alibi, ‘In order to cross over the flood’, she writes: ‘Many waters will cover [everything], but you will be gathered in’. Being covered up is placed in opposition to being protected. Globerman doesn’t accept loss; she strives for rescue.
 
You live on the third floor as if
above cellar or ship’s hold
. . . 
When he sighed, the house moved like a lung. At night
the bed drifted somewhere else.
You stand in the doorway calling
land, land     [Tr. Lisa Katz]                          
 
Ravikovitch welcomes drowning; Globerman is critical of it. She needs the shore. The poem ends with these lines: ‘You haven’t got a chance. You’re simply funny/ how did you manage to drown in the bathtub/ in the belly of the ark’. In an amused-tragic tone, Globerman gives her location away. She’s not in Ravikovitch’s ocean, but in her own bathtub at home. The fear of drowning – as disturbing as it may be – is ridiculed a bit. Noah’s ark is a rescue boat. And the horizon is Globerman’s Mount Ararat. Her home protects and is protected. With Ravikovitch, even a home is not a secure place.
 
In the poem ‘Icarus’, Globerman writes that ‘his father tried/ to give him wings. He had high hopes/ for his son’s future’ – in dialogue with the speaker in Ravikovitch’s ‘Half an hour before the monsoon’ . . . who says,
 
and my son was saved maybe, maybe not
but he’s quick on his feet
and besides he wasn’t with us just then.
I had hopes of him. (Tr. Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld)
 
. . .
 
Globerman’s poetry expresses admiration for the desire to live, almost sanctifying the right to life. She does not write the political poetry we are used to. When she mentions the Holocaust of European Jewry, through the prism of the second generation, as the daughter of survivors, or in her approach to genocide in Kosovo, she finds precise language to describe the cruel nature of humankind. She defends her survivor mother fiercely in ‘Space’, from Alibi:
 
I don’t know how to pray
without the rage that burns holes in the air
when I ask for your life, mother
I go up to the roof
aiming at the smooth skin of the sky
I send God black and blue signs. (Tr. Lisa Katz)         
 
. . .
 
In ‘Second Generation’, Globerman writes
 

Mother leans on Father. Father leans on a shadow.
. . .
We believe in walls. Believe less in a roof.
It has to be built every morning anew. We build.
. . .
Silence is the pitch that stops up gaps, seals the floors. (Tr. Vivian Eden)

In somewhat dry, reportorial language, the daughter of survivors depicts her childhood and young adulthood in a well defended home. Defended from water, of course, is the significance of ‘pitch’. In this case it’s not Noah’s Ark but Moses’ basket among the reeds.
 
. . .
 
In the same poem, the first stanza ends in the line, ‘The floor burns under our feet’ – the element of fire. But the second stanza ends this way: ‘There's a sea roaring underneath the foundations of home’. This line returns us to the water element key to Globerman’s work. The struggle not to drown symbolizes the desire to live. When Globerman writes about the sea under the foundations of her house, she doesn’t mean only her physical, family home. She is also talking about the Hebrew poetic stanza [designated by the same word as the one for ‘home’ – bayit]. Because under the foundations of Yael Globerman’s poetry, the sea roars.