Review Alisa Velaj

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Alisa Velaj

Alisa Velaj was born in 1982 in the port town of Vlora, Albania. She was shortlisted for the annual international Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in UK in June 2014. Her works have appeared in more than 100 print and online international magazines in Europe, UK, USA, Australia etc. Velaj’s poetry book “Dreams” is published by Cyberwit Press in India Besides English, her poems have also been translated into Hebrew, Swedish, Romanian, French, and Portuguese. Her poetry collection With No Sweat At All is scheduled for publication by Cervena Barva Press in November 2020.

LYRIC AS GREETING, LYRIC AS FAREWELL

Alisa Velaj

Poet, Researcher

According to Edward Hirch, "Poets have often taken waving as an emblematic gesture of the poem itself: lyric as greeting, lyric as farewell.".1 Gloria Mindock's poems in her latest collection, "Ash", are fervent farewells of a time of utter destruction that yet transcends to one of superior dignity. They are the farewells from a land where the fire of destruction burns down everything, toward another land where the fire of a loving soul dances a magnificent dance. In this context, ash comes as a word of double connotation: the ash left after everything has been burned, which in fact should have never happened, and the ash from which hope is reborn. This latter kind emerges as the kind of ash from which phoenix is reborn. The poetic collection is structured in four bundles: burnt, baked, buried, and opposition. The first three acts appear to describe the process of burn-down by the destructive fire, the kind of fire that leaves behind the cold ashes of death, while the last act (opposition) aims at conceiving the image of a world that has degraded the meaning of true love. Three instinctive human dimensions have tossed love into flames, exactly the opposite of what Mindock glorifies in her fourth dimension. The poet appeals for a new dimension in order to comprehend the world and the bird of the sun or the bird of fire. The flame must regain a resurrecting quality; the idea that a flame is just a flame (“Plastic”) is altogether intolerable. The poet seeks answers through direct existential questions or subtle poetic conditions, at times in verses and at times in prose poetry, where her poetic fervor craves to see a different image of the world.

"The man surfaces his heart./ He carries it away delicately./It still beats, and he breathes asking / how much sorrow can this heart take? /There is never an answer." (Protected)

"The house becomes ash from the couch burning, / the windows shattering, and glass breaking into air." (Burned beyond

recognition)

The answer to why we cannot resurrect within our spiritual boundaries won't be found, as long as we are burned down in cold ashes, without first gaining awareness of the light of true fire. It is like sleepwalking on the path of death, while wrongly thinking you're rollicking on a swing seat in the gardens of El Dorado. The house that burns is actually us—the human beings, who wake up and go to bed getting burned beyond recognition. Beyond recognition turns into a kind of sarcasm that takes two interpretive directions: first, we just erase awareness as a process of enlightenment and thus, dim-minded, pass up on clarity; second, awareness goes far beyond our sick egos, which means we burn down because we ignore the concept's life-saving essence. In the second bundle, baked, Mindock offers her testimony on how to pursue the path of absolute love, describing for us evil with her heart on a platter. Devil has polluted the air and human brains have been polluted to the extent that killing is natural for some. As if a human being may be roasted in a fire oven just like killed game or fowl!

“Angel. Wrap your wings around the oppressed./ Hold and protect against evil and the hands entagling /the last breath…the

1 Hirsch, Edward. (1999). How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry. San Diego, New York, London: The Center for Documentary Studies in association with A Harvest Book Harcourt, p.46.

last gasp…/The dead bodies can not sing,/therefore, the world is empty” (Air)

The world is empty for lack of regenerating air, for we keep angels away and submissively follow the command of Devil, who has become the Almighty of the air that our minds are breathing. How can we give birth to human thoughts and resurrect out of cold ashes, at a time when the very air we breathe is polluted?!2 In the third bundle, buried, the poet revisits even more determinedly the barren lands of our spiritual demise, the nearly fatalistic impossibility of the resurrection process, if we still insist on our journey down the dark valleys of death. With her eyes heaven-ward, Mindock prays and chants psalms of light, while calling on the reader through verses like the ones below:

“Scream to the black sky, the endless sky, the abyss-/All else is prohibited./Give up, close your eyes, and beg for a light kiss/keep your mouth closed.” (Light)

These are, in brief, the grounds supporting the observation that all the poems of the first three bundles stand for as metaphorical dimensions of the spiritual destruction and, simultaneously, as the poet's personal bidding farewell to evil. Her kind of lyric intensely wants such a farewell to be a pathway to light. The last bundle, opposition, or the blueprint to absolute love, shapes the lyric as a greeting to the enlightened soul, the soul that, like Phoenix, is born out of the ashes of salvation. The structuring of the collection in four bundles that stretch from death to life, along with the manner how the symbols of ash and fire are rerun from one poem to the other in order to justify either a function of a word or the opposite of its function, are certainly poetic techniques that have resulted in superb poetry well-delivered to elite poetry readers.

2 See the analogy to the biblical verse (in particular to its part in bold) in Ephesians 2:2 NIV: “in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.”