by Nicole Yurcaba
New Meridian Arts is one of the independent presses that when I first discovered it, I immediately had to order half of a dozen books and adjust my personal budget for the month’s remainder. Why? Publishers and scholars around the world recognize the need to decolonize the literary canon and allow writers from formerly silenced cultures and countries to have a space in which to awe the world with their stories, their poems, and their talents. Decolonization is difficult yet important, and as Russia’s war in Ukraine causes many to examine the canon and academic programs with a critical eye, the role of independent publishers like New Meridian Arts becomes even more significant. New Meridian Arts is small, but mighty, especially in its efforts to bring a wide range of literature from former Soviet Bloc countries like Croatia, which is one of six former socialist republics of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Emerging from the Croatian tradition is Iva Ticic’s The Skywriter, which examines everyday small things and events some might deem mundane and dissects the places and actions so many take for granted.
A few of the initial poems, like “The Warning,” embrace a dystopian setting to portray real events. The poem opens with the stark, yet passive, line “There is death in the August air.” In August 2014, protestors took to New York City’s streets to demand justice for the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died when Staten Island police placed him in a chokehold. The poem’s speaker juxtaposes the fantasy story of Peter Pan with the realistic image of the Holy Land: “Peter Pan has killed himself, / and in the Holy Land a young boy holds / a soldier’s head by its sagging hair.” In these lines, peace and violence dangerously merge and shape something hideous and unrecognizable. For those familiar with the Eric Garner story, as well as American law enforcement’s frequently racist responses to Black communities, the images provoke an emotional jar from which readers cannot escape. The images also create a distressing universality: violence is everywhere; it is undeniable; it is inescapable. However, the poem does anything but leave readers wallowing in a pit of despair and hopelessness. It concludes with the lines “Let us be peace, the ocean / keeps reverberating.” The lines are a call to action, a command to do better, for both the individual and society.
“The Island Life / of Croatian Variety” is one of the collection’s cultural gems. The virgules the poet uses throughout the poem act as emotional scaffodling, and the poem celebrates the self-restoration offered by the place with which one identifies most. It also reminds readers about the necessity of finding the space to return to and rediscover one’s true self. The speaker, “jobless, and spending,” lives in the moment, their “hopes in a twist.” However, despite the speaker’s nearly destitute state, holds a unique philosophy: “ / what is there to worry about / when the / land and the sea both recognize your ancestry?” The speaker’s return to this ancestral place provides “a calm that comes / with sitting still in where you are from/ even if only generationally.” Diaspora members curious about their genealogy have been returning to their ancestral homelands to experience the culture and learn more about their heritage. Thus, the speaker’s physical and emotional return exemplify an emerging trend in recent decades, especially in former Soviet Bloc countries like Croatia.
Inherent to Ticic’s collection is a sense of wonder and a personal celebration of unique places. “Aurora of the North” celebrates Iceland, a place where “gravel crunched, / sounding like solitude” and “only a black field” provides a space for self-reflection and self-awareness. The speaker gives a nod to Iceland’s long-standing literary heritage, one which continues in Iceland today:
“And it dawned on me that
this might be where
the Icelanders grow
their poetry.”
The speaker observes Iceland’s unique landscape, with its “black field looming ahead.” The landscape provides the speaker with a rather Transcendental cue: “But on my mind, only this: // ‘None of this / is ours.’” The speaker confesses, “I love and loathe the fact that / I cannot put these in my pocket.” This confession is a quiet nod to the Icelandic philosophies regarding leaving nature as one found it so that all may enjoy it—a concept which may seem taboo to many American readers.
Part of The Skywriter’s emotional tug forms from its structure, which takes readers through the national, to the international, and returns them to the domestic. A series of heartbreak poems concludes the collection, and the collection’s final poem—“Last May”— alludes to a romance’s beginning moments. Just as “The Warning” concludes with a hopeful note, “Last May” concludes the collection in this manner. The speaker makes melodramatic statements like, “I wanted to inhale you and I wanted the sun / to stop its assault of setting—.” The speaker, from this point until the poem’s conclusion, develops a liturgical tone and rhythm:
“our dusk-laden chatter, by bathing us in its post-scriptum
long enough for you to wrinkle the couch covers in the shape
of your body and to tell me just everything, the sum
total of your universe.”
Hyphenated words like “dusk-laden” and “post-scriptum” help push the tone and rhythm internally, and the cautious enjambment creates a playful shift of sounds.
The Skywriter is both musical and magical, and its verses are dances of the self, the senses, and the quiet surroundings an individual carries with them each day. Its poems beg the question, “What are the places we call home?” Therefore, each poem is a small journey in pursuit of the answer.
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.
