Swimming The Hellespont
Selected Poems:
1971-2001
Jesse Mavro
Diamond
© 2015 Jesse
Mavro Diamond
Wilderness House
Press
Littleton, MA
ISBN 978-1-329-31315-6
Sofbound, $15.95,
71pages
Review by Zvi A. Sesling
On the back cover of Jesse Mavro Diamond’s book
Judson Evans writes, “Mavro Diamond forges a voice from crucial elements of
Jewish, lesbian, and feminist identity.”
Indeed
all these elements are in Ms. Mavro Diamond’s illuminating collection of poetry
which is personal and intimate, presenting poetry which is not often covered in
mainstream poetics and brings to mind the work of Marilyn Hacker.
Here
is a poem which presents a feminist perspective of body:
The
Beautiful Mystery
may
be a disappointment to bra gents
who
look or perfection in balanced flesh
and
corset men who search for symmetry.
Sisters
know human hips were made to extend
for
arms whose hands reach, trembling, for security
that
comes from witnessing another’s chest
imperfect
as her own.
Let’s leave disillusionment to the lingerie lads:
a woman’s body remains perfectly gorgeous
because it is.
Perfection does exist—
In imperfection move the beautiful mystery.
Now
follow that with a poem that reflects with her Jewish heritage and a past in
which being Jewish was always safe:
Ode
to a Lute
1
In
April, at the bottom of the stairs, we found a stringless lute.
I
saw it first, you claimed. Besides, you joke, you’re Sephardic,
a
horse thief, whereas I, Russian, Ashkenazic, am no criminal.
Take
the lute, I said, and take this story, too:
If a
person steals a horse, she may be on the run
from
worse thieves, they may be chasing her
out
of her own country. Imagine she has no alternative
but
to grab the first horse she sees, jump on it
and
gallop hundreds of miles into a strange land,
changing
her name s she rides, covering her face with a rag
even
at night, so the moonlight will not reveal
her
true identity. Understand? I asked.
But
you had fallen asleep in my lap, cradling the lute.
There
are the missing strings, I whisper.
This is a riff on biblical
Talmudic wisdom and teaching, yet it is in its way a beautiful mystery of its
own, while Ode to a Lute 2 is a different tale with a moral of a different
sadness.
Swimming the Hellespont is
a 30 year odyssey for Jesse Mavro Diamond,
In it she packs 31 of her best poems, including the title poem, which
travels from the past at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau to a hopeful
future which she sees on the horizon.
Whether
the reader is female or male, Jewish or non-Jewish, LGBT or straight there is
something for each reader to absorb and cherish. In other words it is a book to
keep and reread when you want to remember the exigency of the weight of
societal reality.
_________________________________________________________________
Zvi A. Sesling
Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams
Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review
Publisher, Muddy River Books
Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies 7 & 8
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