Yvonne Green: Selected Poems and Translations

Yvonne Green

• Publisher: Smith|Doorstop Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781910367124
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

I like
the way good food and diction go together so clearly. Geographically [these
poems] excel, and in so many other directions too. The poems are different to
what one normally gets in English, the issues far bigger, as in "Dhimmi
Under Sharia Law" (A Lawyer's Poem) and in many others that one may
benefit from. Such excellent poems show how different customs can
nevertheless blend, especially in, "We Speak English Now." I also
very much like, "That I May Know You: " "Let me visit your
houise/and eat something/of what is on your table/hear you and know/some of
your language."' — Alan Sillitoe

From The Assay

Souriya

‘My mother told me a long time ago

you can eat a mountain of salt with someone

and still you cannot know them.

I lived with Moshiach and Souriya

together in one house for forty years,

Mirka and I raised our daughters with them.

At our table we did not eat a mountain of salt.

Together we ate maybe this much.’

His hands and his mind’s eye reckoned out

a mound from his belly to his chin.

‘So how could I know what she would do to me?’

Basmati

I don’t measure the rice

I wash it in an ancient sieve

using my palm and the tips

of my fingers stroking towards

my belly and up and

then brushing away with

the back of my fingers, the rice

a caress on the knuckles

and a satisfying gravel

on the flat of my hand

the cold water cooling

my pulse like eau de cologne

the suggestion of fragrance

promising from the lifeless

wetting grains

my left hand dreaming

on the sieve handle

shuffling the sieve

like a wallah working a fan

the metal strips

of the handle loop pressed into

my dry palm

two different rhythms one dry and hard

and one too cold now

and lively with rice back and forth

back and forth

Our Food

The smell of rice cooking is the smell of my childhood

and a house devoid of cooking smells is no home.

Sometimes I visited other houses which smelled like our house

heavy with the steaming of mint or dill

and tiny cubes of seared liver all seeping into rice,

which would become green and which was called bachsh.

We felt foreign, shy of our differentness

unable to explain the sweetness of brown rice called osh sevo,

where prunes and cinnamon and shin meat had baked slowly

melting into the grains of rice which never lost their form.

Our eggs, called tchumi osh sevo, were placed in water

with an onion skin and left to coddle overnight

so that their shells looked like dark caramel

their flesh like café au lait.

Our salad was chopped,

a woman appraised her refinement by how fast

and how finely she could chop cucumbers, onions, parsley,

coriander and trickiest of all tomatoes ‘no collapsed tomatoes’

a young girl would be scolded if she tried to get her efforts

into the large bowl that she and her mother

(and the other women, if there were a party) were filling.

The knife scraped across the raised chopping board,

always away from the body in a sweeping gesture.

The combination of ingredients never measured

other than by eye. Salt, pepper and lemon, vinegar

or Sabbath wine ad...

Table of contents

• From The Assay
• From After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin
• Poems from Shanghai Lives (2015)