Withholding the names
Two sequences here, the first located in a war-damaged country, the second in a country where a family of refugees arrives. This is war in the voices of bewildered people, torn from the continuity of peaceful lives among orchards, ponies, grandparents. People have names; the country does not.
In not naming the country, Copley involves her readers. We bring the word ‘Ukraine’ into every poem, and that word in turn brings all our individual memories of news reports, TV footage and photographs — of shattered landscapes, broken buildings, grief-harrowed faces. We can’t escape the scale of what we’ve seen and heard in recent months.
For me, that intensifies the pain living in these poems. In ‘When the village was happy’, for example:
there were no bullet holes.
Houses stood upright and panes of glass
sparkled in the windows.
Children played in the fields,
women sat chatting in the market place
and men rolled home only a little drunk.
There’s an innocent simplicity in the language, a timelessness in the way the elements of rural life are laid out. This is how it was; our minds supply how it now is.
When a poem in this pamphlet looks at individuals, they are named: Alena, Katerina, Sophia. When a poem is first-person, there’s no need. The directness is urgent. In a ‘jade cold room’ a mother shares her desperation —
And then I burnt the clothes — his teaching shirts
with the inky cuffs, my summer blouses.
The flames smelled of hair spray and deodorant.
[‘Burning our clothes’]
The refugee family — Petro, Vira, and daughters Dorina and Lana — bring their past with them into a world of form-filling and a high-rise flat ‘in a place called East End’. That’s the only place-name we’re given. Since we don’t know where they’ve come from, they stand for every Ukrainian refugee with memories of gardens and apple trees, their ‘grandparents wearing their coats inside’ in winter. Behind the stories of these individuals stand the ghosts of everyone displaced by war.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, we’ve come to know the names of its towns, villages, bridges, how its rivers flow. By not naming any of these, Copley trusts us to call to mind all the places that are headline news. She shows what this war — and any war — does to ordinary people.