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This superb poetry collection has already been selected for the longlist for Welsh Book of the Year and it’s easy to see why. In these rich, complex poems, Donahaye writes about identity, violence and place, looking particularly at the Isreal-Palestine conflict. They are not propaganda, but dense, shapeshifting pieces that play with language and ideas, poems that are intriguing and unsettling, brutal and sublime.
The title, also the first poem in the book, raises the issue of identity, with the statement that the poetry is a self-portrait, but a self-portrait as someone else. Of course it is referencing the biblical story of Ruth, the archetypal alien, and the title poem introduces many of the ideas of the collection, as it combines past and present, myth and fact, the domestic with the political, the separation of male and female, and because it puts at its heart the idea that the narrator does not belong. A woman stands naked before a group of farming men, longing to know ‘what I am’, but though she seems to be offering herself they ‘are waiting for me, a trespasser, to leave’. You feel that she is trespassing on these men and on their land as an alien and as a woman. The poems come back time and time again to the idea of the body, as sex and as frailty, thirsty and scarred. The body as everything human and as the land itself. While the collection is called ‘Self-Portrait’ I didn’t feel there was one viewpoint here, but that she is playing with different identities, and in doing so demonstrating succinctly the contradictions she is discussing.
In one of my favourites, ‘Remembering Baba Yaga’, the narrator recalls her grandmother and retells the story her grandmother told her, of Baba Yaga, of the girl trying to escape the house running on its chicken feet. The poem is beautifully written, bounding along as fast as the chase it describes with all the infectious energy of the fairytale, yet full of ideas and contradictions you have to stop and consider. ‘The Wooden House was treacherous/ and pitiable: it told her and it told on her.’ I felt that much of what Donahaye is exploring here are ideas and behaviour both ‘treacherous and pitiable’.
This is an important collection, satisfyingly complex works that are both about important political issues and about language. It comes at its themes subtly, but it is not afraid to be vulgar or witty. Whilst I sometimes felt that there were probably layers to some pieces that I was missing, because I don’t have enough personal knowledge of the places and people the narrator is observing, they are still satisfying, shocking, memorable poems. I hope the longlist will mean that many people read this collection, it deserves to be read widely, and I hope its longlisting will lead to shortlisting and more.
Janet Thomas
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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