INTERVIEWS
The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > ISSUE FORTY-FOUR: Feb-Apr (08) > Reviews >Alta Ifland's Voice of Ice...reviewed by Leonard J. Cirino

View Search Result


Voice of Ice
Alta Ifland
Les Figues Press
ISBN 13 Number: 978-1-934254-03-5
ISBN 10 Number: 1-934254-03-7

Reviewer: Leonard J. Cirino



This book is similar to a sauna on a winter night. First, the author undresses in front of the others, the readers, most of whom are unfamiliar. The opening poem, "Birth," begins, "I was born in a lapse of time..." This theme continues throughout the book, with the poet questioning self and the other, or "the shadow," a device Ifland often uses. The book begins with intense renditions of mutilation and out-of-the-body experiences, but always with an accompanying metamorphosis into an alternate reality. Its embodying theme is transformation–from self to other, emigrant to citizen, human to insect, and vice versa. Ifland is not afraid to expose herself or reveal the fears that many people have but are unwilling to confront. She is absolute in her search for the meaning in her life, and she does so with a degree of honesty that is uncommon in today´s world of poetry.

After undressing, she enters the sauna with the eyes of the others on her, and meets their stares with the detachment of one who has experienced the vagaries of being alone but always under the gaze of someone else. As the sauna warms up, she leaves her own particular insecurities and oddities, and moves into a world where other people have compelling feelings and stories. The poem "The Train" is a wonderful juxtaposition of characters and concludes with a surreal image of the conductor´s corpse, "dead drunk under a flock of golden chicks." Ifland has methods to work out her quite sane madness.

Along with her serious nature and thorough examinations of self and society, Ifland has a great sense of humor, displayed mainly in poems about her childhood in Eastern Europe. In "Burials," she opens with the line, "The days when there were no weddings, one could most certainly count on a burial." She then tells of the typical funeral where the deceased was almost always a man and "the widow and other women in his entourage engaged in a series of moanings and genuflections and faintings." Later, the mourners warm up with food and wine, "and soon everyone began taking their clothes off." The poem goes on with people in bras and shorts until the widow empties the contents of the matrimonial bed, and the poem ends with a joke on the widow and everyone there. This is one of many successful pieces in the book, which includes fifty-three prose poems translated from the French by the author, with the French on facing pages.

Along with her fine poems about her childhood in Eastern Europe and many belonging to the genre of "self and other," Ifland writes well of the coast of northern California where she lives. Having spent twenty years on the coast of Mendocino County (north of San Francisco), I can attest that she knows this territory and has a knowledge of country life in rural America. As she says with one long sentence in her poem, "Rain and fire," describing a winter evening near the rural and quite wild coast,

To listen to the rain falling on the roof, its voices like loose
hair, its liquid voices, to watch the fire dying in the hearth,
to feel the veil of heat crumbs on the closed eyelids, to
open your eyes on the almost dead embers, and to hear
crackling wood explode in small sparks, and to feel
the heat advancing in sleepy waves and settling in the
white of the eye, and then to listen again to listen to the
rain that keeps falling above our heads, and to gradually
disappear in the rain with long thin fingers, in the fire
with red coppery tongues.

In contrast, this poem (below) is titled "The summer kitchen" and focuses on a specific memory of living in the country of her childhood.

They called it the summer kitchen because it occupied
a small shed outside the house, a shed of whitewashed
wooden boards with packed earth inside, and because
they used it only in the summer. Inside I was always a
little cool, but a welcoming coolness, in which the body
gladly wrapped itself on hot afternoons.

After all the samplings of various aspects of human and non-human life in Europe, the United States, and in other cities and countries of the world, the reader comes back from the shock of a cold jump into the snow, and the book concludes with a poem simply titled "Death."

Ifland says, "An Arab friend once told me: I find so reassuring the thought that one day I will be no longer." She continues, "This is a very natural way of seeing things; but who among us Westerners could say this?" Ifland travels the entire spectrum from birth to death, and does it with fine language, imagery, philosophy, and a thorough sense of her life and the lives of others.

The book is nicely designed to a 4.25" by 9.25" format into which the poems fit elegantly, and it is printed on a glossy black cover. After reading it, I will most certainly look into other releases by Les Figues.
Enter your email:

Home      Register     About Us/Staff     Submit     Links     Contributors     Advertising     Archives     Blog    Donation    Contact Us    Web Design