dublinka

Elliot Richman published an interesting poem in the journal Confrontation back in 92. It's called The face in the ice and recounts a memory of reading about the siege of Leningrad. On crossing a frozen lake the war correspondent saw a line of human faces imbedded under his boots. The bodies having been swept away, all that was left was a necklace of glass masks. Elliot mourns:


All winter their bodies imprisoned
under the ice, the first spring currents
swept their carcasses to the sea,
leaving only the faces,
etched in blue-green crystals.

What is astounding about this poem is of course the intensity of the image. You could memorise the words, but there is no need. The image has been effortlessly transferred, by the ice, to the war correspondent, to the poet, to the reader etc. This transfer is made possible, not by the sheer horror of the fate of the Russian soldiers, but by the sheer beauty of that horror. And the beauty being such that, I can promise you this: you'll find yourself fixating again and again on the fate of these soldiers, and your mind will not melt such horror, even though part of it needs to.

Elliot goes on to personalise this image with a twist, but I'll leave that to the curious among you to discover by yourself.