E-Book Review: Sparkles on Water

Title: Sparkles on Water 

Author: Marja Blom

Date: 2015

Publisher: Marja Blom

ISBN: none

Length: 24 pages

Quote: "I grew up in the Netherlands and moved to New Zealand in 1997. In 2007 I set up a blog to show people the beauty of New Zealand. Some fellow bloggers...introduced me to the land of poetry. I discovered it, loved it and learned its language."

Few people dare to publish poems in their second language. It's been done well--some medieval songs in Latin are still loved and sung today--but it's usually done as a learning exercise, and the resulting verses have been published anonymously, or casually tucked into collections written in the author's primary language. (Somewhere on this web site there is a little song parody written in Spanish, yes.) Tolkien's songs in both of the languages he constructed for the Rings books come to mind, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's ventures into indigenous Mexican languages. When whole books of verse by non-native speakers of the language have been published, as was done by Andrei Codrescu in his exuberant youth, they tend to be bought as curiosities; if the actual poems then strike readers as being clever, witty, pretty, innovative, moving (in any way except the poor-pitiful-me-is-a-refugee cliche), or funny (in any way except the foreigner-stumbling-over-language cliche), that's a bonus, a happy accident that readers are eager to rave about. The poems don't rank among the greatest in the language; they're in a special category, but they delight all who discover them.

So it went with the online writing groups that discovered Marja Blom and encouraged her to keep writing poems in English and publish this collection of some of her best ones. Blom's English is fluent, sometimes quirky, always readable. Her poems aren't even limited to free verse, which is easy to write in one's native language and translate into whatever other languages one knows. I kept waiting for the "Well that was interesting, I'm sure it sounded better in Dutch" reaction. It didn't happen. Blom writes English as if she's written poems in Dutch, but as if these poems were originally written in English. Some of these poems have traditional English-verse rhythm and rhyme patterns; some have their own patterns of assonance. 

At their best, poems written in someone's second language give native speakers a fresh sense of the possibilities their language offers. Some of Blom's poems have that quality, and may rank among the best poems written in English as a Second Language.

"Some love marigolds

some radiant roses with velvet folds

and then there is weed

It creeps on its knees

swallowing beauty..."

begins a poem celebrating the diversity of wildflowers. 

A poem about springtime begins with the Earth awakening from winter sleep--nothing new there--and then intrigues me with "the sun warps kisses on her cheek." "Warps kisses" is the kind of phrase that has to be mindfully chosen. The intriguing part is the variety of possible meanings: "warps" as an onomatopoeic variant on "plops"? in the sense of "warps as a loom," strings straight threads or lines across the surface? in the sense of "warps as a phonograph record," twists and wrinkles? (Does frost heave, in New Zealand, as it does in North America and Europe?) And what about the echo of "time warps," layers of time that might hypothetically be linked by the resonance created by the sunlight striking the same surface in the same ways, year after year?

What's not to love, for me and probably for some people who read this web site, is Blom's inclination toward a Zen-sanctioned rejection of "mind." We all know the kind of burdensome and distracting thoughts that need to be replaced with the neutral observation of "thinking" in either transcendental or mindful meditation, which seems to be what Zen types' dsparagement of "mind" is meant to mean. At the same time...pooh! Nobody just breathes out little felicities like

"Sunflowers dancing

in harmony together

rocking on a lullaby

waving in windy weather"

A mind was at work there, I quibble...happily. 

I enjoyed this little collection of pretty pictures and poems. You will too. It's currently available as a free download at dutchcorner.blogspot.com, where readers can find some of Blom's new pictures and poems as blog posts.