The Assay
By Yvonne Green
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About this ebook
For all the lucidity of her poetry, her work has an unusual density. This is a fine new voice, which deserves to be widely heard." - Elaine Feinstein"Yvonne Green's poems are strange, evoking unfamiliar worlds and seeing them with their own kind of language. She effaces their merely subjective self and her poems get into their subjects.
What matters is the voices out there, and she hears them. There is so much world, so many stories, included here. It is wonderful to encounter this vivid annex to experience and understanding." - Michael Schmidt
Yvonne Green
Yvonne Green who lives in Hendon and Herzilia was born in London in 1957. Her first collection, "Boukhara", won a Poetry Business Pamphlet award in 2007. Her second collection, "The Assay", won translation funds from Lord Gavron and Celia Atkin and was published in Hebrew by Am Oved as "Hanisu Yi". Her third collection, "After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin", was the Poetry Book Society's Translation Choice for Winter in 2011. Her poem, 'Welcome To Britain', was commended in the Buxton Poetry Competition 2012. She has reviewed for the London Magazine, interviewed for PN Review, contributed to the 2015 "Penguin Book of Russian Poetry" and broadcast on Radio 4.
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Book preview
The Assay - Yvonne Green
I
Boukhara
Souriya
‘My mother told me a long time ago
you can eat a mountain of salt with someone
and still you cannot know them.
I lived with Moshiach and Souriya
together in one house for forty years,
Mirka and I raised our daughters with them.
At our table we did not eat a mountain of salt.
Together we ate maybe this much.’
His hands and his mind’s eye reckoned out
a mound from his belly to his chin.
‘So how could I know what she would do to me?’
Basmati
I don’t measure the rice
I wash it in an ancient sieve
using my palm and the tips
of my fingers stroking towards
my belly and up and
then brushing away with
the back of my fingers, the rice
a caress on the knuckles
and a satisfying gravel
on the flat of my hand
the cold water cooling
my pulse like eau de cologne
the suggestion of fragrance
promising from the lifeless
wetting grains
my left hand dreaming
on the sieve handle
shuffling the sieve
like a wallah working a fan
the metal strips
of the handle loop pressed into
my dry palm
two different rhythms one dry and hard
and one too cold now
and lively with rice back and forth
back and forth
Our Food
The smell of rice cooking is the smell of my childhood
and a house devoid of cooking smells is no home.
Sometimes I visited other houses which smelled like our house
heavy with the steaming of mint or dill
and tiny cubes of seared liver all seeping into rice,
which would become green and which was called bachsh.
We felt foreign, shy of our differentness
unable to explain the sweetness of brown rice called osh sevo,
where prunes and cinnamon and shin meat had baked slowly
melting into the grains of rice which never lost their form.
Our eggs, called tchumi osh sevo, were placed in water
with an onion skin and left to coddle overnight
so that their shells looked like dark caramel
their flesh like café au