INTRODUCTION TO SHADOWLANDS BY ANTONIA ALEXANDRA KLIMENKO

Shadowlands is a haunting landscape of love and loss, a mystical journey of remembrance and longing that spans a lifetime and beyond. Each poem—even the darkest--resonates with a vibration of light glimpsed through eyes…like portals-opening into the soul. Indeed, there are a number of references that hint of the poet’s observation, wonder and contemplation from an early age. In the first section: Loss of Innocence:

I remember the cottage where I was born

Its thick stone walls, and deep-set windows,            

Where I sat on rainy days, watching

 

Contrasting images, “damp coats drying near the fire’’ are repeated much the same as night and day, within and without—life’s countless dualities. Yet upon visiting the graveyard as a boy as revealed in his poem All Soul’s Day everything seems less black and white. Here, there is no distinct separation between life and death…but rather more grey matter befitting a land of shadows.

Searching for my ancestral bones

I came upon a grave, striking in its littleness,

Where a two-year-old girl was laid to rest.

'She is not dead but sleeping'

The headstone preached in faith.

 

Revealed in this marvellous metaphor his reverence for the wisdom of life and love in Section 2: Loss of Love

I still harvest the soft fruit of those summer seasons.

My fingers stained with the blood of those berries,

Crushed for their sacred ink.

 

He further exalts in life’s Divine Madness…

You arrive in my thoughts again

Uninvited, unannounced, incarnated.

The one who gifted me with fire

And inscribed my brass heart with love.

And I know it will always be so

Until moon-blessed inspiration

Turns to cosmic dust

And the riddle is unravelled.

 

Even the cosmic dust, the dust of memory captured as a moment in time. In his third section, Loss of Life, we are in the land of dying embers with glimmers of hope and renewal rising from the ash.

The bare branches of winter trees

That seemed sketched in charcoal

Against a pale spring sky

 

One senses the appreciation for being neither this nor that but rather entirely human in his poems Flawed and Broken Things:

I had often seen your brokenness

And you laughed when I told you

How it was your flaws that made you fabulous.

 

And his poem, Waiting:

I pull into the driveway, step into the hall.

My phone rings like a funeral bell

She couldn’t find the words to tell me

What her sobbing said more eloquently.

 

It is, in fact, in his last section, Loss of Humanity--arguably his most powerful-- that it all comes together in one meaningful whole. Devoted to bringing attention to the War in Gaza and the plight of the Palestinian people…

I want to sit by a gurgling stream and dream.

But bombs are falling on Gaza

And the bleeding water screams

As it rushes past, to fill an ocean of grief.

 

…each poem paints a stunning and poignant portrait. In Birthday Boy of Gaza the heartfelt suffering comes to light through the ordinary and extraordinary details of everyday life—the boy’s wishes snuffed out along with the lives of his beloved

Eyes closed to make a wish

But with one fierce puff

The stars were quenched.

To be orphaned is not the hope

He cherished in his heart,

But simply that the box, so neatly wrapped

Might contain the thing he had hinted at.

Now his home is but a ghostly hulk.

His mother's face that smiled before he blinked

Is steel-kissed and frozen in a stare,

Blood oozing from shrapnel in her chest.

And silent is his father's baritone song

Of birthday cheer,

His husk crushed beneath a slab of concrete.

His teenage sister, like a rag- doll, torn to shreds,

 

And, in fact, he reminds us of how the entire world is at a loss in the face of this war. In his poem Bethlehem

…for it is not

The crowning glory of humanity,

But another crown of thorns

 

In the face of all wars…for all of humanity is affected by our inhumanity.

Rachel’s Children

Rachel’s children wept—put to the sword.

Their blood cried from the earth

For justice, but in giving vengeance, instead;

You have dishonoured the dead.

When you wept, the world went with you

And you held the heart of the world

In the palm of your hand

Until your clenched fist crushed it

 

Or in Lullaby (for Gaza)

Her father kneeling in the stones

Tenderly lifts her broken bones

In one last hug to say goodbye

Tears wash his dirty face

Missiles whistling from afar

But no ocean of rhetoric

Can cleanse the disgrace

Of such atrocities in this war

 

Kieran Beville offers to us a richly textured terrain of grief and joy and all the varying shades of experience and sentiments in between. Wise, powerful, passionate and tender, Shadwlands  is a land that connects us all, with neither division or boundaries. It is a memorable revelation of and tribute to the courage and resilience of the undying human spirit.

Antonia Alexandra Klimenko (Poet in Residence at SpokenWord Paris)