War of the Beasts and the Animals

The meditation on lack of ego and ‘I’ following from this opening appears to refer to the poet forever going through the motions without a sense of grounded identity, the criticism ballooning into the surreal: anyone-without-an-I will wander, pretending to be ‘a jar of mayonnaise’ or a cat. The criticism levelled at this subject is that she has no sense of self, therefore no originality, no authentic voice. Because there is an emptiness at the heart of her, she loves ‘embedding quotes’, incorporating the voices and narratives of others.

‘Spolia’ is certainly rich with embedded quotes, they jut from the poem’s wall like classical marble ornaments: Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, the Russian Silver Age poet Mikhail Kuzmin, Osip Mandelstam, Rilke – usually subtly altered or edited. Because the poem highlights texture and poetic process, I have left some in place in translation, and replaced others with similar English-language quotes the reader may or may not recognise, or that leave a nagging sensation of familiarity.

As the poem progresses, the opening motif of a single female poetic consciousness is bodied forth and amplified to become the consciousness of a poetic culture, from Pushkin to the contemporary women poets Polina Barskova and Anna Glazova; in nursery rhymes, ballads, translations (of Goethe’s ‘Erlkönig’, for example) and riffs on style and preoccupation. But ‘Spolia’ also embodies the female consciousness of a nation, Russia (‘Russia’ is a feminine proper noun in Russian). When the poem rounds to its close with a passage that parallels the original criticisms levelled at the individual poet, the same criticisms are now levelled at a country:

she simply isn’t able to speak for herself

so she is always ruled by others

 

because her history repeats and repeats itself

takes on ersatz and out of date forms

But this poem is a paean to place, however unlovable that place makes itself. The poem paints a series of stylised pictures of 20th-century Soviet Russia, much in the manner of the Soviet Metro station iconography, itself described in the poem: ‘milk white enamel girls / in gilded kazakh skull caps’. Tiny filmic moments, the war and the postwar period, the seventies, with women in headscarves, motorbikes racing along Soviet roads, and the bread cooling on racks in shops. A long sequence, interspersed with camera shutter clicks, mimics the act of gazing at a family album of the 20th century:

brooch at her throat, hair gathered in a bun

my grandmother (only a little older than me)

feeding a squirrel in a park on the outskirts of moscow

 

lonely soldier drinking mineral with syrup

 

school uniform, fitting room, apron-winged, unhemmed

‘Spolia’ has a number of striking parallels with Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017; Fitzcarraldo, 2021), a prose work which examines the nature of memory and archive and their role in our survival, as well as documenting Maria’s own family history. In places the two texts overlap and inform one another: In Memory of Memory circles around the historical family photo album, those defining images of the past which are as elusive as they are apparent and manifest. The images in ‘Spolia’ are recognisably the same people: grandparents in army uniform and in evacuation; great grandparents outside institutions for early revolutionaries; celebrations at the end of the war.

This is a Russia that is unloved, unhappy, scattered by war, decentred – and yet strangely beautiful and resilient, glowing with Tarkovskian light; loveable and desirous in the ugly-lyrical images that end the poem.

‘War of the Beasts and the Animals’ uses the same structural and compositional techniques as ‘Spolia’ but to quite a different end and effect. It is loosely chronological although it circles and repeats, binding together different wars and histories into a single narrative which opens with the Russian revolution and Civil War, the first incidence of a Soviet myth of war and sacrifice. There are hints and scraps of ballads and films of the Russian Civil War, such as the following short section which describes shorthand a famous civil war battle scene in an early Soviet film (‘Chapaev’):

from the river the bayonets glittered

glimpses of white sleeve

volunteer walking at volunteer

cigarette in the death-grip of teeth

 

human waves

drum bangs

machine gun strafes

camera pans

The poem also reaches back into Russian history to include several tiny episodes from a beautiful medieval text, ‘The Tale of Igor’s campaign’, the story of an unsuccessful military campaign with many exquisitely lyrical portents of doom:

voices raised in lament

which once were full of joy