BEHOLD
by Nicki Jackowska
Enitharmon Press, Paperback; 80 pages,
ISBN 978-1-904634-85-0
Price £9.99

Gordon Weetman

“[D]o not ask the perfect sentence of me,” Jackowska warns in the early pages of Behold. This is not a defence of faulty grammar, but an appeal against anything contrived or mechanistic in verse: “let not the march of logic / sour my curves nor explanations / catapult my tongue into monotonous / tickings of a metronome.”

No danger here of falling into such rationalistic traps. Jackowska’s poetry is a thing of wild magic, full of arcane images that seem to emerge from the deeper reaches of the subconscious.

Her voice is relentlessly fresh, its phrasing inventive to the point of being abstruse. How many poets could get away with tortured syntax like “fugitive / those sound-waves lining your / base voice I am bewitched by”? But Jackowska does not merely carry it off without awkwardness. Instead, she makes the language sing. Her poems show an aversion to caesurae, preferring to let unstopped line-endings provide a gentle punctuation to their flow. The result: a subtle, organic rhythm akin to breathing.

Ted Hughes once described her previous works as “breathing in their own tides.” The tidal metaphor is still apt, as is Hughes’s allusion to “teeming psychic flora and fauna”.  Behold is rife with botanical and zoological references, and the natural world provides us with some of its most moving imagery. For example, in “Leaving the Birds” a tiny event offers powerful intimations of mortality: “Where a twig breaks / evening grows upon / each stalk, masters it”.

History forms a central theme of Behold, and many of the poems touch on traumatic events in the poet’s heritage. However, Jackowska’s symbols are sometimes difficult to penetrate. Often she seems to be working within the confines of a very personal iconography.

“Requiem”, an enigmatic poem peppered with Biblical allusions, relates an act of violence taking place in “hills … alive with the sound of dying”. The victim is the speaker’s mother, the perpetrator a man who “will put a barrel to [her] mouth … to hide the sound of silence”.

Jackowska intersperses English lines with Latin to create layers of opacity, but we are left with a strong sense that something terrible has happened. The ambiguity is telling: sometimes even language itself recoils from the horrors it attempts to portray.

The title poem of the collection deals with the legacy of the Holocaust. Set in Kraków, 2005, “Behold” threads together past, present, history and autobiography into a harrowing exploration of guilt. The speaker betrays herself for crying “only once / in the place / where rivers would not be enough”, and for her cowardice in having done “the acceptable / thing and gained the museum in / a crumbling step or two, then fled from its hush”.

The poem avoids heavy-handedness by concerning itself with specificities. Jackowska describes “shoes … with laces missing / and different sizes / according to where they fell”, and “glass tanks / of tangled hair [that] held also / perfect plaits, a whole head taken”. Such piercing details snag the reader’s flesh, tugging at our nerve endings. It is no coincidence that barbs and hooks are among Jackowska’s favoured motifs.

Along with past atrocities, Behold touches on current affairs. “Altered States” concerns itself with the War on Terror. The poet’s outrage is clear: “the beasts of war”, she writes, “have trampled across thresholds uninvited”. She exhorts readers to distrust “these doctors who would mend / the world and end up slaying the variety / of species.”

Jackowska is incapable of simple polemic. Mystery is an indispensable part of her work, and while this creates certain barriers to comprehension, it also covers everything she touches with a shimmering veil of uncertainty. Often you feel the writing reaching for emotions that are beyond description: “a wriggling line of ink trying for shape / on an obstinate page”. Though we may not decipher every inch of Jackowska’s meaning, we can at least marvel at the singular beauty of her voice.