Sibyl James reviews Maryna Ajaja's "In Deep"
In Deep,
Poetry by Maryna Ajaja
ISBN 978-1-941137-12-3
Wild Ocean Press,
38 Bob Kaufman Alley
San Francisco, CA 94133
2020, paperback, 67 pages, $15.00
In Deep
Reviewed by Sibyl James
Like the masked deep sea diver on the cover, this collection of poems goes deep and its waters are international, ranging from Port Townsend to Moscow with many stops in between. Everywhere Ajaja brings up pithy bits of wisdom from the deeps, what Alexander Pope knew as epigrams, only this poet’s are far more original and striking: “Grief is a short word for a long phenomenon” or “Returning is like the horse that gallops forward frame by frame.” Or the one that for a time became the message on my phone answering machine: “History runs in one door and out the other / without being useful.”
Pieces of poems serve up a still life: “A flat white house in a square field. / A pile of children’s papers on a red chair.” Other times it’s an entire plot in an image or two: “At the trolley stop a woman / with two black eyes wearing an orange coat / lurches across the road.” Or “After he throws the loveseat at me, I cannot get up.”
The people in these poems are sometimes the usual suspects though never presented in predictable ways.
But I should stop teasing you with tiny bits and give an example of both Ajaja’s play on words and headlong leaps into the emotion of a moment, as in the end of “Overcoming Vertigo” (pg.4):
I hold on in the storm though I’d like to let go
as I did before
in my green Dodge truck
on a high sheer icy winter road
despite having vertigo
or maybe just
to spite it.
There are people in these poems holding back: “I am seven years old and Mom has that No-no! look / so I talk to the vacant air of the backseat.” And people who want to speak: “If I could remove the stone from my mouth, / remove my mouth from my mouth, / my muscle of malcontent.” And people who do: “I talk back all the time./I talk back out loud and silently.” And everyone can relate to that last voice who, as the poem progresses, talks back to the radio, sick of the hacking and meddling, knowing a lot about hypocrisy, bugged, talking back, and swearing.
The people in these poems are sometimes the usual suspects—fathers, mothers, lovers—though never presented in predictable ways. And then there are the characters we hadn’t expected, as in “Poem with Heroes” (pg.36):
My first hero was Akhmatova because she endured.
My second was Marina Tsvetayeva because she didn’t.
My third was Osip Mandelstam and wife Nadezhda,
her lists of guilty persons and his cockroach poem.
Ajaja’s Russian connections play almost as large a role in the poems as her Pacific Northwest ones, some literary like Akhmatova, some from her experiences living in that country, some with the intimacy of her poem dedicated to her Russian husband’s back (pg.58):
His back never turns on me.
It may leave before I do
or move over to make room.
And when far from me, turns
back to me each time
in need to offer his tender
prideful lust.
Though they range geographically, culturally, and emotionally deep, what holds these poems together like the fisherman’s multi-paneled net in “Point No Point” is Ajaja’s voice—original, personal, and not too afraid to dive. As Nancy Rawles notes in her back-of-the-book blurb, this book “will remind you that love has a sense of humor and empathy waits in unexpected places.”
Sibyl James has published 11 books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including The Grand Piano Range, In China with Harpo and Karl (about her year teaching in China), and The Adventures of Stout Mama (short stories that cured one woman of post-partum blues), plus The Further Adventures of Stout Mama (including "Bad Hormone Day"). Much of her nonfiction work is concerned with making other cultures accessible to a US audience, including her Vietnam memoir, Ho Chi Minh's Motorbike, and her account of a year in West Africa, The Last Woro Woro to Treichville.