| HOME | BIOGRAPHY | BOOKS | THEATRE AND FILM | ON-LINE | POETRY | ESSAYS & LITERARY CRITICISM | INTERVIEWS AND ARTICLES |REVIEWS & PRESS | BLOG |
|
The Neverfield Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet of Palestinian parentage hailing from Bethlehem. Her poetry in English appeared in several literary periodicals and was translated into French, Spanish, and Arabic. She read her poetry in several countries and recorded a CD, TRAVELING ROOMS (UK:ASC Records, 1999), with piano and woodwind accompaniment. THE NEVERFIELD is a poem in three parts, dispensed in mostly unpunctuated verse, sustaining a lyrical dream that moves from scene to scene seamlessly to express longing and belonging. Like all oneiric experiences, its logic is sui generis and gives the poet a confident voice that rings authentic and fearless in the use of language and imagery. The layout on the printed page helps the reader to capture the modulated cadence of her intentions and to flow with the pregnant wording. A last word in one verse is often repeated to start a following verse, keeping continuity of breath and meaning. Yellow, the dominant color of the book's cover, is the prevailing color of the NeverFIELD: "nothing else existed but yellow/ yellow/ was I ever to see more?" (p. 2); and "in the yellowness of my life/ I met the crowd of my memory" (p. 5). The crowd of her memory is dispersed in the field, the dream, the poem. In the first part (pp. 1-30), it is the memory of "a childhood of moving streetlights" and the growth of consciousness of self and others, "...longing for a/ corner in my grandfather's blood" (p. 6) and—from Alexandria, Boston, Bloomsbury--longing for a lost homeland, imagining "villagers imagining flower petals/ surrounding their houses" (p. 19) and looking for the poet who wrote "Towards my heart, / The only town not captured yet." (p. 16) In the second part (pp. 31-42), the search continues for the poetic Lancelot, passing through memories of Sitti's (grandma's) kitchen, "father's falling eyes" (p. 36), mother's arabesque cushions, brother's "poems he hadn't written yet" (pp. 35-36), and sister's "Damascus sky" placed on the tip of her eyes (p. 37), when--out of the bluebells--"the harmony of words/...created a yellow rose" and she, "woman/ poet in violet solitude" continued crying "for/ the lost poet in my nightly dreams" (p. 38).
In the third
part (pp. 42-57), an experience in Paris brings the poet to her as
well as poetry: "the doves settled inside me.../ it was the overture
and the finale all at once" (p. 49), "the poet hanging on my
eyelashes, his words/ falling like paint dripping on the book of my
spirit" (p. 50). There is exhilaration and a quicker pace from here
to the poem's end and the yearning for homeland and poet is fused.
The poem says on March 13th two suns shone on Camelot, a great joy
and a great sorrow: the day is her poet's birthday and "the birth of
new words/ inside minds still unborn..." (p. 54). Is it a
reference to Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (born on March 13,
1941), whom she quotes earlier and whose poetry embodies Palestinian
pain and hope. All we know is that Nathalie Handal does find her
homeland and her self in the kingdom of the word, to which she
longs and belongs. |
|||
