Emerald Roe on "waves whisper the shoreline to life"

Waves Whisper the Shoreline to Life is truly a beautiful and remarkable book. You must be very happy and very proud of such a brilliant collection. A whole life, your life, so many lives: through your experiences and your interactions with your grandparents and your parents and your friends and your child, you touch us so softly and sting us in turn. And with all these lives, filled with suffering and joy and peace and pain and terror and simple happiness, you carry such a deeply resonant sense of place, from your childhood in the clear cool air of Poland to the summer storms of Queensland. I love your sensitivity and the way you give me a subtle sense of changing light and times and moods of day fading into night fading into day, and the responses of the landscape to the light and to the seasons.


And those terrible, unspeakable poems from the Congo. There is nothing I can say about them, but be struck silent by the tragedy and horror. The economy of your writing sharpens the focus and plunges me into recognition of unassuagable pain. They are a great achievement.


And I resonate to the staunch and clear feminism which runs through them all -- a strong woman writing! Wonderful!


Thank you very much Agnieszka, you have made a book which will be a great treasure for so many of us.

Invitation

"waves whisper the shoreline to life" by agnieszka niemira
book launch

Saturday February 5 at 5.15pm
at Brisbane Square Library

Please come and join us in celebration of a new book of poetry "waves whisper the shoreline to life” by Agnieszka Niemira, an international award-winning poet.

Date: Sat 5 Feb 2011
Time: 5.15pm for a 5.30pm start
Venue: Community Meeting Room on Ground Level,
Brisbane Square Library,
266 George Street , Brisbane .
Cost: Free
RSVP:  agnieszka.niemira1@gmail.com or
0451975723


waves whisper the shoreline to life” reviews

Patricia Prime reviews ‘waves whisper the shoreline to life’
by Agnieszka Niemira

Reprinted from: Another Lost Shark
http://anotherlostshark.com/2010/12/06/patricia-prime-reviews-waves-whisper-the-shoreline-to-life-by-agnieszka-niemira/

waves whisper the shoreline to life, Agnieszka Niemira.
Post Pressed, 38 Suncroft St. , Mt. Gravatt , Queensland 4122, Australia . www.postpressed.com.au. 2010. 98 pp. ISBN 978-1921214-63-9. AUSS$19.95 + p&p

Reviewed by Patricia Prime

waves whisper the shoreline to life is Agnieszka Niemira’s second book of poetry. This is a more substantial volume than Niemira’s first collection, making the invisible transparent. Here again, we have a beautiful volume published by Post Pressed, with front cover photo by the poet, back cover photo by Elleni Toumpas and additional photos by Barrie Frost.

A very different presentation characterizes many of the poems in this collection. Many of the poems are longer than in the previous book, although it also contains haiku and short poems.

The first lines of the very first poem, “the story begins” reads very simply:

it is quiet
the house is asleep
i am enveloped
in its imperceptible breathing

This process of discovery, from inside to outside, the search to establish some sense of possible relationship between the inner self and the exterior world, is central to this collection. The same initial poem concludes thus:

i will love
i will question
what love actually means

should i be trusting you with myself like that
and would you trust me to be taken where i go

waves whisper the shoreline to life is characterized by Niemira’s alertness to incidents that took place in wartime. “visitors” and “survivors 1945” are concerned with the horrors of war. From “visitors”:

a gun pointed at my brothers and me
my father watching

and from “survivors 1945”:

a single woman
her house destroyed

they give her
one of their rooms

The ideas in these two poems are fully felt, unsentimentally realized and emotionally felt. The precariousness of human individuality, the difficulty of sustaining family values in the face of war, functions in Niemira’s work not just as an intellectual conceit but as emotional reality. In the poem “echoes,” for example, the poet lives with “grandma and grandpa / in a post-german house.” But, though they are surrounded by “wetlands / meadows gardens” animals, friends, and relatives, all is not well in this idyllic setting:

grandpa drinks
i dread seeing him
leaving the house with his mates

but by the end of the poem, we discover the reason for grandpa’s drinking and anger:

he survives a german forced labour camp
i listen
i hear screams

grandfather talks
war echoes

Niemira’s poetic persona has a confident, but not over-confident, sense of its own identity. Niemira is able to write of others with a degree of empathy. There is an impressive meticulousness of emotional observation and a lack of sentimentality which isn’t flaunted, as we see in the love poem “summer loving”:

you come with delicate breeze
you take me into the sapphire-blue snowstorm

we experience the omnipotence
of misty sanctification

the mysterious kiss ripens
in the freedom of the night

The registering of human emotions is one of Niemira’s strengths, and it is in her treatment of those people in her immediate circle that her work is at its most quietly moving. One has no doubt in believing in the truth of what Niemira says in a fine poem “the world has no sharp edges”:

so the world is round, no sharp edges,
she tends to relax into various colours:
sea green, purple, blue . . . rainbow . . .
could be falling out of the sky too,
perhaps being flexible and bouncy
with an honestly smiling face.

A longer poem “dimensions” is full of Niemira’s experiences, full of her sense of love, warmth and peace and in both the apprehension and comprehension of what is implied in the recognition of herself in a photo:

what is this she points to the screen
marcus looks at the photo
his tearful eyes find me
is that you

But Niemira is not simply a poet of emotional lives. She also writes poems in which the search for an axis of living is conducted in natural settings. In the poem “dawn,” for example, she hears the birds and goes outside to listen to them:

hearing the birds singing their greetings
i go outside to unite with the world of awakening
i breathe in the freshness
the place is alive
though people are nowhere to be seen

In such poems the precision of Niemira’s writing is a recurrent delight. Niemira’s real but unaffected attentiveness to nature is registered in a language which, very naturally, makes such attentiveness evidence both of a stilled self-consciousness and of a process of self-discovery. There is a breathtaking responsiveness to simple beauty in her work. In “the intimately known mystery” she observes that “my baby is out of my womb / out of my body // quiet for a moment / then crying / i stroke my son’s cheek featherily.” Another poem “motherhood” also recalls the poet’s experience of being a mother, “before i was just myself / now i am a mother / to eternity.” The long poem “perfection” shows us the child’s humming and laughter:

the music is perfected
by my son’s humming and laughter
i want to delight in the moment
but the longing to see him
overwhelms me
i open the door to my bedroom
he runs towards me
and gives his mother
the morning hug

“laughter” is a poem at ease with itself, conveying with skilful brevity the love between poet and grandmother:

i come in quietly
the house breathes to its own rhythm
hello granny dearest i say softly
she does not recognize me
but i know what to do
. . . i laugh
oh agnieszka she smiles
and dozes off in her armchair

In these poems we pick up on the poet’s relationships as subject, with a smile towards her feelings, shown in simple language. Niemira pays minute attention to language, managing to achieve warmth and humour with concision and pointedness; and invention, either in the form and layout or use of space.

In “silencescream” the effect of dreadfulness is conveyed by subtle and varying line length, reflecting the state of mind of the personae, in which everything is disjointed. This is hysteria with a strange inevitability:

in silence
you tell me your story
i see the scars
looking into your young eyes
i notice
there is beauty but no youth in them

the bloodstained images
you’ve brought to life
stay with us

we fall asleep regardless

After this there is a group of tough, short poems which reveal the terrors of war. In “terror triptych” “girls for sale / girls for the taking,” while in “honour” we see a “gang-raped woman // stoned to death.” “staying alive” describes the persona of a young woman in an unpleasant situation. A feat this, to picture such ugliness in an excellent poem. Finally “this is my home” tells us that the poet would invite us in “but i had a bad experience.”

Although many of the poems make one look at hard subjects, reading this collection with its terse but vibrant images, tense voices and lives, the poems gather momentum each time you read them.

Patricia Prime
Reprinted from: Another Lost Shark
http://anotherlostshark.com/2010/12/06/patricia-prime-reviews-waves-whisper-the-shoreline-to-life-by-agnieszka-niemira/


***

I thoroughly enjoyed Agnieszka Niemira’s latest poetry collection titled “waves whisper the shoreline to life” for the freshness of its perceptions, sharpness, subtlety, wit, epigrammatic economy and precision, and attitude/s.

I plan to read the book again soon, to revisit its pleasures.

Congratulations to the author on a very interesting collection of work!

Jena Woodhouse


Like all good books, “waves whisper the shoreline to life” is a journey you won’t want to end. It extends the forms and explorations the author offered in her first book “making the invisible transparent”. “waves” echoes with many voices, speaking of war, violence, escape, survival, love, magic, and the dangers of silent forests. New words appear here for the first time expressing moments that will be immediately familiar. Moments of unity with nature. Moments drifting “in that peculiar place between life and death and life where anything can happen”. Moments when ” life catches in places…music” and words.

So near the start, when one of the voices asks “would you trust me to be taken where i go?” the answer has to be “yes”. Read on and the shoreline will come to life. And carry you away.

Duncan Richardson


Reading Niemira you may sense, with a small shiver that your lookout with the glorious panoramic view is most likely a ledge that is crumbled underneath. The world Niemira challenges is tentative, transitory and facile.

even as i write
i die
even as i write


Against these odds there are godless miracles of kindness and a sense of transcendence in the ordinary:

i have left a piece of me
in the ordinary day


Jeffrey Harpeng