Martina Straková
- Slovakia -
Martina Straková studied cultural sciences and graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the Comenius University in Bratislava. Later she received scholarships at leading German universities and her PhD title in Philosophy. For her poetry debut Postcards from Invisible Places (Pohľadnice z neviditeľných miest, 2019) she received the Bridges of Struga Award for the best poetry debut in 2019 awarded annually under the auspices of the UNESCO by the world's renowned poetry festival, the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in North Macedonia. Since 2013, she has been co-organizing the International Poetry Festival Ars Poetica, where she holds a free creative writing workshop Bring Your Poem offered to the wide public as a regular part of the festival program. She is dedicated to writing poetry, fairy tales for children (under her pen name Irène Findrych), painting and artistic translation from/to German and English and is the author of the creative concept idea and texts of the online lifestyle project for women Stories and Vicissitudes of Gertrud Wurm (Príbehy a peripetie Gertrud Wurmovej). She lives and works in Bratislava.
Martina Straková’s first collection, Postcards from Invisible Places, was published in 2019. The opening poem, river of murmurs, begins:
into this river I go up to my eyes
and here I glimpse
my flowing
and the collection may be thought of like this: a report on a flow of life, not in conventional reportage but in an original language of water, plants, moths, and other natural things.
There are four sections, entitled Cabinet Photos, Herbaria, Lepidoptera, and Roman Pines. The first section is much concerned with the sea and marine creatures. The sea is exotic, experienced in tourism; it is unknown, or insufficiently known, as the speaker of the poems feels. Devoting herself sometimes to a relationship, at others to her own heights and depths, the speaker alternates between mental planes. This section has at least two very striking poems (I have yet to decipher; I’m a wrinkly / whale from the endlessly flowing sea).
In the second section, dedicated to the memory of her country’s great botanist Izabela Textorisová, the speaker is more in her element. Slovakia’s immensely rich culture of healing plants, which astonished me when I encountered it, is drawn upon here, but unfailingly with a light touch – non-botanists need not worry! Let’s take, for example, Melissa officinalis/lemon balm:
radiant
music of the spheres
my dearest
river pearl
act so
that no arrhythmia
may disturb your healing harmony
The publisher’s material tells us that Martina Straková studied at German universities and has a doctorate in the history of philosophy. Here and there one may find echoes of great philosophical thoughts in these poems, but they’re subtle and unobtrusive. Martina Straková wears her learning lightly. Her discipline in thinking no doubt helps her to write very purely and starkly in the single printed poem of the crucial third section – but then she also has the discipline simply to let those echoes die out:
~ Samia Cynthia
Ailanthus Silkmoth
an undeveloped mouth opening
so that
she cannot
speak and receive food
and lives precisely
always
only
seven days
Cynthia has at least one larger significance, which half of the readers will grasp instantly and many of the others fairly quickly. But she may send the mind in other directions also. Some may think of a great biologist reflecting on another small creature, a certain wasp, whose fate, as terrible as Cynthia’s, made him think disturbing thoughts about theology. Anyhow, the reader must make of this poem whatever she or he will. All the author wants to add, in the small, pleasing handwriting that sometimes appears in the book, is an enigmatic three-line poem:
I want to say to you
better one hears better
from a height down
The echoes of Cynthia die out (though one hears them again in the final section), and her image fades out also in a series of sketches by Lívia Kožušková, whose illustrations accompany these poems well.
The fourth section is planned as a piece of music, with tempo indications: Adagio, Andante, etc. This conclusion is piercingly sad: Allegro is the tempo obviously missing there. To end such a sequence is certainly very difficult. But although the collection has a story which has an ending, to my mind the destination is less important than what one meets along the way.
The speaker of the poems has a gift for thinking sympathetically about the growing of plants, in parallel to her own growing. This goes for even such a humble, not-much-admired variety as Portulaca oleraca ~ dog-grass. Or Arnica montana ~ mountain arnica, another plant not wont to live luxuriously, which inspires a fine miniature:
there
where the press of bricks is
invisible
as the hierarchy of the heavenly angels
there let’s be joined
(but here my English falls short of the last word in the Slovak version, napojení, which also evokes suggestions of being enabled to drink – ordinary water, or perhaps even a love potion).
Both the animate and inanimate make bracing contact, as in the rock clasped me, where memory takes the speaker back to her plants:
I enter a memory
of the healing aroma
of chamomiles.
I roam through fields
of dandelion, bramble and chicory...
The plants are known and trusted, they will do their work of healing as far as they can. But the unknown hangs over this collection. While drawing freely on the heritage of natural and other science, the speaker does not feel it is everything. At her boldest, the root-seeking speaker ponders the flow of the mysterious sea:
I have still to decipher
the frequency of flow
of moving waters
oceans
inner ear
conches and scrolls
of the submarine realm
where all is signalled
sonarly
and finished with fins
I repose in deepest concentration
where neither sound nor light
will reach unless
by the casts of telepathy
Essay by John Minahane
Poetry
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river of murmurs / rieka šumov
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I. / I.
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II. / II.
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III. / III.
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IV. / IV.
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V. / V.
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VI. / VI.
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VII. / VII.
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VIII. / VIII.
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IX. / IX.
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X. / X.
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XI. / XI.
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XII. / XII.
