The Assay

Yvonne Green

• Publisher: The Poetry Business
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781912196968
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

"I like the way good food and diction go together so clearly... 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." - Alan Sillitoe"These enthralling and lovely poems begin with rich recollections of another country ( so we ate, so we loved ), but darken into the shock of domestic violence. Her poems are absolutely straightforward to read, but quite unforgettable." - Alison Brackenbury"Yvonne Green takes us into the unfamilar world of Boukhara and Judeo Tajik culture with complete assurance.For all the lucidity of her poetry, her work has an unusual density. This is a fine new voice, which deserves to be widely heard." - Elaine Feinstein"Yvonne Green's poems are strange, evoking unfamiliar worlds and seeing them with their own kind of language. She effaces their merely subjective self and her poems get into their subjects.What matters is the voices out there, and she hears them. There is so much world, so many stories, included here. It is wonderful to encounter this vivid annex to experience and understanding." - Michael Schmidt

I
Boukhara

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 added at the last moment

so that this slota should not be asalak – mushy.

Joma

Unevenly edged, cream, indigo, orange and aquamarine oblongs,

parallel against a coral background. Long wide cuffs and hems

brocaded with plum, yellow, turquoise and sapphire chevrons.

No two joma are the same. These came from Boukhara.

When stored they’re turned inside out by hands in arm holes,

then turned inward by hands back to back.

Then the great weight of silk is rolled by one hand over the other

the thickness pressed under the right elbow and wrapped in muslin

which absorbs the scent in the grosgrain but not the colour from the ikat.

We dance at weddings, with them around our shoulders

our backs straight, elbows bent, hands raised, wrists rotating

then we drape them around someone else, miming an invitation

to follow the old ways. On Pesach, we come to a table

vivid with stacks of romaine lettuce, and clouds of salty water

wearing my grandparents’ gestures in ceremonial coats

which carry the musk of generations, of free men.

Doyra

Shallow, like a big tambourine, without jingles,

its thick cream parchment fixed to its dark

wood hoop by round headed brass tacks. Yula

first warmed its surface with a candle flame.

Then he raised and lowered the drum time and time

again, balancing it on his palms, as though to estimate

its weight, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• I Boukhara
• II And For Years After
• III The Assay
• IV Originating Summons
• Translations from the Russian of Semyon Lipkin (1911-2003)
• Glossary
• Notes