“Settlement Poems I & II” and “Wake-Pick Poems” by Kristjana Gunnars

What moves me, as I read through these three collections, is how the poet works with language and landscape, with the concept of home as it functions for the immigrant, the individual who is discovering place. In Settlement Poems I and Settlement Poems II Gunnars imagines the experience of immigrants as they move from old to new Iceland, their feelings of dislocation and their attempts to begin again. In Wake-Pick Poems she explores the consciousness of a woman as she grows from childhood to adulthood, facing almost insurmountable difficulties of day-to-day survival. These difficulties translate themselves into an experience of imprisonment, one vitally evoked in the title. (The wake-pick, a small wooden stick with a slit on one side to catch the eyelid, was used in old Iceland to keep people awake late at night so they could complete the knitting required for their survival.)

In Settlement Poems I the changeling appears as an immigrant; in Wake-Pick Poems, Gunnars devotes seventeen poems to exploring a child of uncertain, confused identity, as she attempts to forge a personal identity within a culture dominated by superstition, ritual and prescribed sex roles. Throughout her work, Gunnars explores individual and collective identity, ultimately defining it with images that describe basic acts of survival: catching fish, skinning rabbits, knitting sweaters.

All three collections explore the process of forming a new, vital mythology of home. For Gunnars, the quest for place reveals the elusiveness of home:

i want to go home, when i’m home
i want to go home too
you always want to
(Wake-Pick Poems)

Home is ambiguous, unnamed: the search for a new place is defined by conflict. The tensions that work throughout the poems — between old and new Iceland, baptism and drowning, memory and recreation, imagination and reality, birth and death, the weaving of threads and the weaving of stories — reveal correspondences that move toward a synthesis. The synthesis is achieved only through the making of the poem: through the portrayed struggle of the individual voice within the collective experience, as a peculiar language within a large landscape.

Gunnars’ voice is clear and resonant. She chooses words with attention to their sound as well as their meaning; she creates a tone that is objective, often caustic. The forceful rhythm of the poems is, at times, almost metronomic; the imagery, taken from nature and the Icelandic culture, is strong, sometimes brutal:

to take life for life, cut
round the middle, pull
the fur off, chop
the head & feet off with
a hunting knife, cut from throat
to tail through the pelvic bone
rib cage, around the genitals
pull the organs through the pelvic

opening, wash away the blood

of the past, take life
stuff the inside with fresh
sapling boughs & carry it, the rabbit
home, life for life on my back
(Settlement Poems II)

The power of the poem rests in the delineation of the action: the description is sharp, detailed, accurate. The blood of the animal becomes symbolic of the past that is no longer useful; the skin is symbolic of the part of history that must be transformed because it is necessary for life. The rabbit-skinner in his own way is a poet, much like the changeling in Wake-Pick Poems, who is sent off with paper strapped on her back. And, like the woman in Wake-Pick Poems who comments “my work is my life/ with it i pay”, this poem expresses Gunnars’ conviction that the creation of art is an act of survival and that, like life itself, it is paid for through suffering.

Gunnars is a complex, extremely talented poet. The three books, resonating with correspondences, express her vision of the Icelandic culture, a vision that becomes mythic through her intense presentation. Although, at moments, the imagery becomes dense and the language abstract, producing some obscurity, the imagery is generally rich, the language clear and precise. One by one the poems beautifully reveal the ambiguity of home, creating space for thought — but as a whole, they are relentless in their expression of suffering. Even in the Wake-Pick Poems, where a sense of mischief begins to appear, it gives way to a sense of desolation. Gunnars expresses an essential loneliness of home, of artistic vision, that is almost unbearable.

Although I recognize that this is what Gunnars wants to express, I long for some relief from it, some experience of joy, some small delight. ■

Kathie Kolybaba is a Winnipeg free lance writer who specializes in contemporary Canadian poetry.