On the book of poetry The Housemaster and Margaret by Nina Bulgakova – Skopje: Dialog, 2006
In honor of daisies1F
1. First reading possibility, the simplified version
(for those who hadn’t read – or hadn’t recently re-read – The Master and Margarita2F by Mikhail Bulgakov):
At the beginning, as first possibility to absorb this poetry book by Nina Bulgakova, I must start with her own warning for the eventual readers – that this is one very much intimate poetry. As she claims in her own (auto)Prologue of her book, she fully understands the common uneasiness of the intimists, that means she accepts and justifies it. So it sounds quite logical when she admits that I was refusing to undress my innerself in poetry, and immediately after that she accents the real reasons why she finally and actually did that after all, because, as she says – while I was refusing, Daisy/Margaret was insisting on it. Daisy/Margaret wanted that, and Daisy/Margaret was capable of doing it! In the name of the self-acceptance (accepting of oneself and of others) these verses happened.
Her expressive attitude requires maximum freedom of the formal aspect. That’s why the inner-rhythm governs in her poetry exclusively dictated by the emotions. All of her emotions and inner-senses, Bulgakova manages to sublime into one word, as for instance, the word bastion in her same-named opening song of this book, or as the words balm, circle, dinner, needle, etc. Much likely a men or a child overwhelmed by the power of one’s emotions. Anyway, the human personality is so strong that however the intention to express a pure thought is great, at the end, the human being is expressing mostly emotions. But, in that way, those chosen words have the greatest intensity of their own, and that’s why – when those words are articulated that way – they can spear and nests in the very core of human soul. Those words – in the most of the cases – are equal to the ‘arch-sound’. And the syntactic construction in her verses is actually a sum of that kind of ‘arch-sounds’, rhythmically linked:
An almond in the throat.
A bastion in the Heart.
A biedermeier of doubts
under the veil of kisses.
Brocade under the loins
and the Bulgakov’s Master
carefully hidden in the bosoms.
(Bastion)
Bulgakova always knows to show moderation in her expression and rhyming, but at the same time to manifest her untamable nature in playing with that same expression manner, as in the song Mantra:
I do Mantras,
Magic spells I throw at you.
Medallion on your neck.
Marble under your feet.
Meteor in your desire.
Magnet in your thoughts.
Magnolia under your fingers.
Mandala for your consciousness
Mag you are,
Magma I am!
I do Mantras,
and in the very moment –
I’m your Muse again.
First Inspiration.
A little reminder: Arthur Rimbaud followed the line made by Baudelaire in the linguistic adventure – I found the colors of the sonants: – A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green – says Rimbaud when he speaks about the alchemy of the word2F. In that synestetic spirit Bulgakova also builds a colored world of her own. She places the contrapuncts: cold with orange, ice with yellow, rough with pastel rose, steel grey with green, grim with turquoise. The Rimbaud’s sonants here are transformed in the emotional states of the other, and his colors seem banal in comparison with the spectrum of shades in her song Stained glass window. What matters, is the fact that she understands and follows the adventure that Rimbaud anticipates in his poetics: to set free the words from their cognitive meaning and to let them into their instinctive life. That’s way she is so untamed (wild) in making some junctures of meanings, as: basilicas of silence (Bastion), a gulp of a song, marinated verse, aromatic cake of glassed words, sugar-layered smiles (Dinner), exhausted raspberries (Daisy/Margaret (or new Eloise)).
The subliming of the verse onto a single word, as well as the division of the text in none-classical couplets, or the division of the song into parts and sub-songs, means only pauses, or blanks in the discourse of the song, or of the silence as Bulgakova’s favorite theme. And of the pain above and under all, which, sooner or later should be released, or must be shared (Swan’s Song). It’s the same, says Bulgakova, as “bleeding”, purification, a kind of soul’s detoxification, a self-forgiveness, and a self-acceptance:
During the years
a pain was missing,
for the song to burst from me.
#b
1. Behind the Daisies, I recognize an awakening, freshness, a new wind blowing in the contemporary Macedonian poetry. So, this title isn’t just randomly choosen to be in a dialog only with the title of the Nina Bulgakova’s poetry book, but also to accent that those verses give a new breath to the Macedonian word of poetry. The expression “In Honor of Daisies” is a synonym for “In Honor of the New Spring in Macedonian Poetry”. Namely, the confessional poetry becomes recognizable in the so called ‘intimate phase’ (1950-1955) which happened as euphoric awareness of the poets’ right to speak for himself as himself. At the beginning, there were much naïve romanticism and sentimentality, so many poets recognized the limitations of this very personal way of expression; actually, they were placed in front of their own incapability to structure there intimate confessions to sound and seem as real poetry. But, this phase in Macedonian poetry meant the only way to the real lyricism, with the further refining of that kind of expression. And this poetry book of Bulgakova is the real example of such newly-refined poetic expression.
2. Margarit(k)a = Daisy