Transient raptures and a wicked dream
Untamed: Lyrics and Erotics
by Eva Kolacz
Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2024
$23.95 / 9781771715621
Reviewed by Carellin Brooks
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Subtitling this book “Lyrics and Erotics” may have been a mistake on the part of the publishers, Ekstasis Editions. The reader who flips through in search of the promised erotics will find only veiled references to what used to be called, coyly, the act of love, or, conversely, its opposite: “our shivering love sits,” “the empty city of my body.” In “love lasting an hour,” the title presumably refers to a single sexual experience, but again in entirely allusive terms: “but without these transient raptures / it’s impossible to reach paradise.”
But here’s the misleading part: this young poet is far less interested in her “transient raptures,” however enjoyable, than in making sense of the relationships in which the first-person speaker is, sometimes unwillingly, consumed. “The story begins with a young woman’s desire to find love,” begins the preface. Alas, as with so many such quests, the promised joining of two turns all too soon into “the harsh realities of loneliness in a marriage.”
According to the book’s copyright page, Victoria-based Eva Kolacz wrote these poems in her twenties, in Poland. The book is subdivided into four sections: Love, Marriage, The Run, and Untamed. Short quoted pieces from Emily Dickinson herald each section, and quotations from other poets head some of Kolacz’s own verse.
The poems transcribe what seems to be a familiar story of love, repeated loss, and mourning. It’s impossible not to enjoy this secondhand look into what seem like first-time experiences. The verses are fresh and charming, if intermittently prematurely bitter at the failure of what was meant to be a permanent union. The narrator wonders, in “everything is a whim of fate,” where the fault lies: is it “because love has chosen two blind individuals / unwilling to compromise?” Kolacz’s speaker laments, in “you have sold me,” the loss of her illusions: “it was meant to be a shared life, it turned into a wicked dream.”
You can see a young poet here trying to make sense of her newly urgent desires, sexual and otherwise. Adrift, free again, the narrator muses on loss and how it makes room, in “empty hands,” for experiments with other, new lovers:
empty hands,
love slipped through my fingers
…now I can reach out for a different fruit
A new man will eat it,
Later, the “I” of the poems experiences the wax and wane of impermanent relationships: bliss, but also a lover’s boredom and betrayal. In “apples,” the speaker returns, alone, to the place she visited the summer before with a man: “‘I heard,’ said the woman, ‘he went abroad, that he got married, well, people change.’”
Melancholy and ardent, yes, but these poems also have a transient quality, unfixed, like the life of the narrator itself. No sooner does the writer settle on a metaphor than she flits to another, as in the poem “the tree and the bird,” quoted here in its entirety:
The tree from the other side of the riverbank called me
I jumped into the swift current of water
then the bird unfurled its wings and asked me to follow
I soared into darkness of the night
Like a faithful hound on the trail of a master
There is nothing wrong with reaching for successive images to gesture towards experience, but what is missing here is a link: between the poet who jumps into the current of water and the poet who soars after the bird into the darkness, not to mention the poet who, nose to ground, follows a scent invisible to anyone but her. The images, lush and lovely, each bring up different associations for the reader. What are we meant to take from these couplets and the last line? A poet submerged and carried along by experience, one who glides far above the workday world when others are dreaming in the night, or one enslaved by a scent she must follow? All of the above, surely; but poems build their power through successive aggregations of imagery.
Kolacz translated this book from its original Polish herself and dedicates it “To all of you, women”—a timely shout out just after International Women’s Day. The poet at the end of the book writes of continued sorrow, and the last lines of the last poem printed here are a lament:
now, I don’t know where to look,
where to look
for love
But it’s the title of the last section and of the book itself, Untamed, that hints at a life beyond the poet’s early circumstances, with their fragile relationships and easy betrayals. Who has Eva Kolacz become since Untamed: Lyrics and Erotics? Three subsequent books of poetry suggest she still has plenty to say, in whichever language she chooses.
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Carellin Brooks’ most recent book of poetry, Learned, was published in 2022 by Book*hug Press. She lives in Vancouver. [Editor’s note: Learned was reviewed in BCR by Linda Rogers. Brooks has reviewed Chalene Knight, Catherine Owen, Erin Steele, Jes Battis, Jen Currin, Daniel Zomparelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Mx. Sly, Debbie Bateman, Michael V. Smith, Buffy Cram, and Maryanna Gabriel for BCR.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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