Samara Garfinkle : DREAM FRAGMENTS, by Mirabel

DREAM FRAGMENTS, Mirabel
Cactus Press, 2020

 

 

 

Dreams, and our memories of them, do tend to come to us in mirage-like fragments. In DREAM FRAGMENTS, Avleen K Mokha (aka Mirabel) has crafted a sinuous narrative of sights, sounds and slumber: a memoir of immigration, of the fitful struggle of an unfitting love, and the story of a young woman gradually finding the self-confidence to acknowledge her inner voice.

In this debut collection of poetry, we are treated to vignettes of Mirabel’s experience of moving from her childhood city of Mumbai, India to Montreal, Canada. We are taken through the shifting sands of sleep and time, and the accompanying hopes, anxieties, and feelings of alienation as she navigates both a new and familiar gridlock of city streets and disappointments. We are witness to contrasting symbols of McDonald’s restaurants and churches through Mirabel’s eyes, and both a longing for and a reticence of intimacy. What is relatable and universal is the sense of desire for a sanctuary in these scattered remnants of recall, among the loneliness and uncertainty of movement and change.

Mirabel’s background is in Linguistics, having studied both Linguistics and Speech-Language Pathology at McGill University in Montreal; fittingly, there is almost a choked claustrophobia to some of DREAM FRAGMENTS’ earlier poems, of the terror of being unable to speak. We open with a troubled question of identity in “Linguistic Nightmare”, and subsequently are transported through fragmented odysseys of illusions, fears, recollections and desires from the poet’s confessional perspective.

Mirabel summons recurring symbols of mirrors, locked doors, ghosts and phantoms: These nightmarish themes develop into a thoughtfulness of distance—between lovers, between family and heritage, between two homes—and into more sober reflections of womanhood, on the vulnerabilities of girlhood, and of the miracle of being human (in “Melatonin”, the poet reminds herself to “Soften & release: / like loose clay becomes pottery, / I become anew at night” and to “tighten and believe / your animal heart”).

In a similar way, DREAM FRAGMENTS chases circles around itself, invoking the feeling of being unable to escape an old emotional wound or existential anxiety as we navigate from one familiar dream to the next. This circular imagery is echoed throughout; in Golden Hour: “...your spine already / a sundial chasing the moon,” in “Redirected”: “Even my dreams / are rivers that want / to flow back to you,” and “Remembrance”: “A tree rings around itself”—Mirabel evokes the circuitousness of the unconscious, and we are suddenly lucid of how it feels to dream.

A few of these works are written in second person, as though in conversation with a lost love. This differentiation between speaker and addressee is ostensibly painted as tragedy but there are underlying tones of self-awareness in this triumph of separation, which culminate in the final poem, “Talk Back.” Mirabel writes:

Something feral in me comes out, says [...]
no to the possible,
no to the real,
no to you demanding
small things not yours.

I feed her now with warm water, eyes alight
          with the heat of survival.

This feral womanhood is fully capable of disowning “unwanted corset” and what does not serve her or her personal growth. Paradoxically, the poem “Self-Sacrifice” addresses saving the self, rather than becoming a martyr: “every night i am trying to find ways to be / and offering up a younger bone of me.” It seems that with its placement in the collection and proximity to the poem “Talk Back” that there is a burgeoning sense of the mature selfhood in this sacrifice of Mirabel’s idea of herself as a young girl.

Indeed the reader is able to follow a loose emotional chronology in DREAM FRAGMENTS, from states of “Derealization” (“I used to think I was someone, / but I was just another one / of those pedestrians whose faces / we never quite catch”)—a fear of self-knowledge and assertion—to an eventual acceptance of the developing self, which finally culminates in “Talk Back”, this final poem representing feminine maturation and integration of the wilder aspects of womanhood (“I am unmovable little girl … First, as faint as hope. / Then, pink like / a woman returned to life.”) It is a thrilling climax following claustrophobia, taking a first breath that is all our own.

A dream is an expression of delusion, hope, trauma, memory, and inspiration for change. DREAM FRAGMENTS is written as an overt farewell to a city of origin, to an unsuitable relationship, and of a covert goodbye to a sense of personal floundering as the poet’s voice emerges from the crest of an old sense of self into a more certain ability of self-expression. It is an achingly vulnerable and empowering read, speaking to both the child of wonder and the self-possessed adult in us.

Mirabel is following up her first chapbook with a full-length collection, The Vanishing Act (& The Miracle After), available June 1st, 2023 from Guernica Editions.

 

 

 

 

 

Samara Garfinkle is a Montreal-based classical soprano, poet, and voice teacher with a Master of Music from the University of Ottawa. Her poetry has appeared in journals and magazines such as Yolk Literary, Columba Poetry, The Nelligan Review and others, and her debut chapbook, Dual Realms, was published with Cactus Press in 2022. Samara is the host of the monthly reading series SpeakUp: The Montreal Interactive Poetry Exchange.

Website: www.samaragarfinkle.com

Willow Loveday Little : Dual Realms, by Samara Garfinkle

Dual Realms, Samara Garfinkle
Catcus Press, 2022

 

 

 

 

How do you know who you are when you’re in the process of becoming yourself? Dual Realms, the debut collection by Samara Garfinkle, dives into the psyche to explore the mind within a symbolic framework. It would be misleading to say these poems are “multi-faceted.” While they are richly varied, it’s more accurate to call them “dual-faceted” or as Garfinkle herself puts it, “Janus-faced.” Dichotomies reveal themselves throughout: investigating the “I” and the “us,” the benevolent and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious.

And this duality illuminates. Garfinkle’s writing take the form of fables—compositions which, though they bear features that distinguish them as poems, carry narrative in a way more akin to a fable. “The Boy Who Became God” for instance, tells the story of a child named Jacob who has “a wandering mind.” It has more visible plot to it than what’s typical of poetry nowadays and a keen straightforwardness—we are told plainly that “This was a child who indeed believed/ in the transformative power/ of smaller tales—and yet Garfinkle compromises none of the abstract beauty or wordplay associated with the poetic pole. The writing itself is compelling: she makes use of percussive alliteration, such as in “[Love] Language Acquisition:” “…angular gyrus (—cue mystical image of gyrating gurus—)”. Whether informed by Garfinkle’s background in music or love of fables, this incantational quality will remain for readers to wonder at.

In fact, there’s a psychic goldmine of material to interpret in Dual Realms. A careful reader will discover certain lines are intentionally italicized and brackets or hyphens used to create dual associations. It could be “clock(un)wise” to move in one direction. Risks might come with leaving a place “When(ce) I have since / Never been able /To return.” Even words like “I,” “One,” “Will,” and “Ourselves” are curiously capitalized at times, encouraging an archetypal or allegorical reading of each poem in relation to the others. And the sections do inform each other. Two definitions for “psyche” grace the opening pages: one from psychology and the other, philosophy. This is a book about both.

The characters encountered are Jungian. Powerful female figures such as “Mother” or the questing Wordwitch from “Dream Forest Fable” find their voices and wield them. But while these characters are benevolent—seeking to nurture or inform the reader—one might say “dreamer”—they are only one side of the coin. On the flip side: the cautionary tale. “The Minotaur Mind” is the mind of a coward; someone unwilling to face the maze. A minotaur is a hybrid creature, a human and a monster. “So many routes this minotaur could take […] his sunken heart is the only way/ to be safe, in shadow.” If we’re not willing to face our own darkness, how can we ever truly know ourselves?

We could dive into the Unknown, but at what cost? What risk? “What a deadly, deep way down: / what if - I – drown?” the narrator wonders in “The Rift.” (Note the “I” in bold font.)

But while the risk may be great, Garfinkle’s poems suggest potential reward renders the pursuit worthwhile. For although self-reflection requires a willingness to admit one’s failures, shortcomings, and flaws, you don’t get there without first making a choice. And as she writes in the closing lines of the collection, “I know your Will/ will be your own.”

Fables are short, digestible stories which convey morals. In keeping with its trademark duality, these poems are fables and yet defy the category: they are short yet vast; digestible, yet whet the appetite; convey morals, but are neither bald nor didactic. Dual Realms is a chapbook that will thrill lovers of Aesop, mysticism, and psychology. And, anyone ready to remove their mask and dive in.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Willow Loveday Little is a British-Canadian writer whose work has appeared in places such as The Dalhousie Review, The Selkie's Very Much Alive: Stories of Resilience anthology, HAL, The League of Canadian Poets chapbook series, yolk literary, and On Spec. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University and is the author of a chapbook, Xenia, and a full-length poetry collection, (Vice) Viscera, both out with Cactus Press.