by Nicole Yurcaba
Embracing minimalism and straight-forwardness, the poems in Baiba Bicole’s poetry blends intimate personal vulnerability and an openness with nature. Movement and flow mimicking a river permeate Bicole’s poems, sweeping readers into their gentle language and experimental form. At times extreme and carefully universal, Plamen Press’s dual-language edition of To Taste the River, translated from Latvian by Bitite Vinklers, is a poetic force in its own right.
A refugee during World War II, Bicole left Latvia and has, since 1950, lived in the United States. An exile poet, her work was banned in Soviet-occupied Latvia. However, the themes of war, exile, and oppression rarely, even implicitly, enter the poems in To Taste the River. Like many refugees and exiled persons from Eastern Europe and the Baltics, Bicole’s poems acknowledge a pre-Soviet motherland respectfully, even longingly. This sentiment initially appears in the poem “Ancestral Mother,” a quietly elegant poem. The speaker describes the “She” as “the bowl and the spoon at once” and “the light, steaming / potato/ white milk and barley groat.” These allusions to many of Latvian cuisine’s staples establish that for even the diaspora, food is a strong means of maintaining cultural identity. The unnamed “she” symbolizes Latvian defiance in the face of exile and Soviet oppression:
she is the table, and she is the bed,
from which, pressing through
the years,
climbs out and rises a tribe,
and the language of shawls and song.
The lines and images speak loudly, especially in the context of Latvian history, particularly the historical events surrounding the Crisis Phase (August 1940 to May 1945) when Soviets killed nearly 35,000 Latvians and another 134,000 fled as refugees to Western Europe.
“‘As if this day were unending’” is another notable poem featured in the collection. The experimental form is initially noticeable: the lines taper left to right.This tapering reinforces phrases like “the hours uncountable” and “as if to measure time.” The tapering creates a sense of drifting timelessness. Also interesting is the placement of solitary phrases like “try to forget” and “try to remember so much” as independent lines.
“’In the vastness between us’” is a quiet, Dickinson-like ode to separation. The direct, minimalist language combines with the poem’s tapering structure to create a melancholic tone. Fortifying the tone is the repetition of words like “hollow” and “sea.” The incorporation of water-related imagery such as “flood,” “deeps,” and “waves” exudes a sense of hopelessness, of irreconcilable loss. However, despite this sense of loss, the poem turns hopeful:
And we?–You and I, from our separate shores,
walked across the waters to meet
in mid-sea.
The interrogative statement, the em dash, and the hyphenation of “mid-sea” create a dream-like, surreal image. The phrase “walked across the waters to meet” may allude to the New Testament depiction of Christ walking on the water; it is also perhaps an insinuation about returning to one’s roots and homeland after years of separation.
To Taste the River is not only rife with natural imagery, it also, at times, bears a folkloric tone. Traditionally, Latvian folk songs personify nature and rely on animism. Carrying these elements into poetry is Bicole’s poem “The One Who Wanted to Get Away.” Magical in tone and fantastical in theme, an unnamed male character “became a student of birds” after he “tipped up the horizon” and discovered an “older world.” Similarly to how it forms in “Ancestral Mother,” nostalgia shapes thanks to references to “cabbage,” “onion” and “the bark of lindens, / to be cut, peeled, plaited–.” Again, food, as well as the character’s transformation into a bird, centralizes cultural preservation. In turn, these elements echo the cultural defiance first established in “Ancestral Mother.” The words “Thin” and “light” embody the concept of fragility of maintaining cultural identity in the face of an oppressor, but solidify the notion that often the smallest spark of remembrance can produce a flame of redefinition and revolution.
To Taste the River is as artful as it is fearless and defiant. Accompanying the poems are a few of Bicole’s ink drawings. In many ways, it is only appropriate that these drawings appear in the collection. Each drawing consists of a single, continuous, flowing line. The drawings’ lines are literal, while the poems’ lines are figurative, formed via words. These poetic lines wait for readers to grasp one end and find their unique way to the other end where they can sit quietly for a few moments, contemplating their tiny role in the universe’s vastness.
Nicole Yurcaba (Ukrainian: Нікола Юрцаба–Nikola Yurtsaba) is a Ukrainian (Hutsul/Lemko) American poet and essayist. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Lindenwood Review, Whiskey Island, Raven Chronicles, West Trade Review, Appalachian Heritage, North of Oxford, and many other online and print journals. Nicole teaches poetry workshops for Southern New Hampshire University and is a guest book reviewer for Sage Cigarettes, Tupelo Quarterly, Colorado Review, and The Southern Review of Books.
