Yvonne Green: Selected Poems and Translations
By Yvonne Green
()
About this ebook
the way good food and diction go together so clearly. Geographically [these
poems] excel, and in so many other directions too. The poems are different to
what one normally gets in English, the issues far bigger, as in "Dhimmi
Under Sharia Law" (A Lawyer's Poem) and in many others that one may
benefit from. Such excellent poems show how different customs can
nevertheless blend, especially in, "We Speak English Now." I also
very much like, "That I May Know You:" "Let me visit your
houise/and eat something/of what is on your table/hear you and know/some of
your language."' — Alan Sillitoe
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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Yvonne Green - Yvonne Green
From The Assay
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 lait.
Our salad was chopped,
a woman appraised her refinement by how fast
and how finely she could chop cucumbers, onions, parsley,
coriander and trickiest of all tomatoes ‘no collapsed tomatoes’
a young girl would be scolded if she tried to get her efforts
into the large bowl that she and her mother
(and the other women, if there were a party) were filling.
The knife scraped across the raised chopping board,
always away from the body in a sweeping gesture.
The combination of ingredients never measured
other than by eye. Salt, pepper and lemon, vinegar
or Sabbath wine added at the last moment
so that this slota should not be asalak – mushy.
Joma
Unevenly edged, cream, indigo, orange and aquamarine oblongs,
parallel against a coral background. Long wide cuffs and hems
brocaded with plum, yellow, turquoise and sapphire chevrons.
No two joma are the same. These came from Boukhara.
When stored they’re turned inside