Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 3, No 1: CLRI February 2016
Book Review on A House Made Of Glass
A HOUSE MADE OF GLASS | KUĆA OD STAKLA ガラスの家 | (In Serbian, Japanese and English languages)
A HOUSE MADE OF GLASS
Although a title was not always about the nature or the real identity of the collection gathered between the front and the back book covers, it has always, or almost always, emphasized a path to follow in order to figure out writer’s intention or mission. The poems in Tatjana Debeljacki’s collection – The House Made of Glass, along with poet’s sincerity in the conventional statement and ethic-aesthetic obligation, construct the “house of view and reflection”. One can look through glass, but can see the own reflection as well. Like a mirror that doubles the space in front of one self and other self at the same time. So this “house of glass” creates a special view, a telescope to perceive the inner world, but also a “greenhouse” where people, things, emotions, time and eternity, life and death… exist simultaneously, like in the poem “Real People”.
People die only In dusk or dawn, There are no eternal graves.
I smell on sweet basil Pleasantly and divine, And I love up to freedom.
In the considerable number of poems, almost on a level of the poetic emblem and rule, the thought and experience of a man’s alienation is suggested; that habits, preconceptions and rigid institutional ways of explaining and accepting the world collide with conscientiousness and the most basic needs and primordial urges. At the same time, as for good romanticists, for Tatjana Debeljacki, the beauty is a way of resistance to death, but it doesn’t exist in this poetry as an aesthetic category, but as a hope and feeling. Only that is built in special circumstances can outlive its moment, only that that is close to a “tragic sense of life” can come closer to the truth. In the poem “Bare Face”, bareness of feelings, as a prerequisite and result of faith and love, love transforms to the dead end of meaning.
I’ve been sick since the very start, I don’t care up to the very end of the game. They lost it. What about the other man? In the twentieth chapter in the eight line He was betrayed by the bare face. In the twenty-third chapter, It was goodbye. The same face under the hat, Bare face.
In the same poem, we recognize essential non-determinability (it seems that the poetess insists on that) of mutual transitions from pictorial grade to conceptual, from abstract to realistic grade - of the poems in whole, and also of the single poem images - in dynamic change and connecting of various cognitive perspectives, through which the world manifests itself. In the scope of that relation, sublime and generalized, sacral and profane, work as borders of conceptual limits; illusory antagonisms (I’m looking in lacking/ but I have it in looking for it) , clarifying more deeply the basic poetic principle of the poem in whole, forming a broad thought horizon which often exceeds the subject, depraving its fixed limits because of revealing the unusual and the original placed behind it. Beyond conventionality and fixed stereotypes, beyond expected causes and consequences. So, there is only one front side and a lot of back sides that Tatjana Debeljacki is searching for, persistently and for a long time, and she is finding them in most successful poems and single verses. Her self-reflexivity isn’t just a need to perceive more deeply the causes and its projections on a spiritual map, but she wants to perceive all conditions between the visible and the invisible, and social rules and its images in the proximity and the spirit of experience (the worst is when you die from the inside).
Diverse rhythm does not muffle the thought and the associativity, managing to focus the attention to the image diversity and suggestiveness. Poetess wants to find and paint the mysticism of the relation between outer - and inner drama, and to find the right measure for her lyrical reflection in their overlapping. It can be absolutely stated that she manages to do that in significant number of poems, and all of that has to do with poet’s idea striving to have a clear thought and content outline of each poem, and for each poem to be an image of a special psychological state and lyrical sense of the world.
Tatjana Debeljacki is a poet of atmosphere, and not only visually shaped one. Life experience anticipation and meditativeness of these poems carry a need to create complex lyrical image, but also to verify meaning and drama of the crossed path. That feeling, that we could claim to be the dominant characteristic of this book, closes the poetess and the reader to the other end of poetically multi-valent personality; to the special connection of skeptical and vital sense of the world. To the poetic fluid made of image and emotion, which precede every intellectual synthesis.
The verse and the poem in whole is for Tatjana Debeljacki a part of intention to create a poetic world (substitute for hostile and deceiving reality) which would have some constants, and where the restless and short human life, exhausted with the crisis of meaning, would find ways of making sense; if not in some new sense, then at least in realizing the present nonsense.
Excerpts
A house made of glass.
The last performance is given there,
Last role,
A role without a price.
Lovers, on your parting
Fly away, fly.
For long, for long restrain your silence.
In the dark of night, at least one star belongs to you.
