Down the backbone of poetry
For me, the poetry of Dimana Yordanova has always sounded like a chord - strained to breaking point. If we listen to two of Bulgaria’s distinguished men of letters, however, we can find a sea of metaphysical balance underneath that string. According to the playwright and poet Alexander Sekulov, her works “remind us that besides ironizing and self-ironizing, the notion of fate should be present in a good poem”. The poet Elin Rahnev sees in Yordanova’s poems “a lancet that unmercifully cuts through every bodily part, our memory and the blood vessels of everyday life, leaving a slashed vein that faces the sky”. Thus, the destructive quality implied by Rahnev is wonderfully balanced by the stability and the inevitability of fate pointed out by the other poet. Perhaps, these two ingredients – the slashed vein and monolithic fate make the alloy from which the key to Yordanova’s poetry is forged (an association with Amy Winehouse is entirely plausible). On the other hand, looking for a key to her poetry might be as useful as looking for a key to the house pictured here:
A HOME
let us have a rope, darling,
let us not have a roof
The title and the two lines form the entire text of the poem ‘A home’ included in ‘Down the backbone’ - a collection of poems published in 2018 by the Janet 45 publishing house.
In the book we find poems celebrating the wonderful fact that we are mortal; that we are fragile, transient, aching and wounded creatures, whose wounds could provide us with some metaphysical answers. The poems are short and quick, like a quick pulsation of cosmic energy surrounded by the immensity of the white page. Some of them end on a single word that can be loud as a shriek or quiet as the whisper of a mysterious visitor who has come at night to our door but we can’t be sure whether he has entered or not.
COMPASS
To come at night,
to not come in
to see his footsteps
on the morning snow.
To find his shoes before the door.
Here multiple meanings vibrate like the needle of a compass which can show us the right way or beguile us with an equal and opposite possibility, and this uncertainty is strengthened by the use of unconjugated verbs. Just like this one, all the other poems included in the book are whirlpools of emotions; emotions offered but not accepted, emotions perceived, yet never expressed, emotions that touch and split up in an instant.
Yordanova’s first book is titled “The men and women I have been” which might serve as a good subtitle for Virginia Wolf’s ‘Orlando’.
Another allusion to Woolf – this time not to her writings, but to her tragic fate - shimmers at the end of book’s eponymous poem ‘Down the backbone’.
She, with dishevelled bikini, tousled,
listening to the sea
whenever it roared
she cried out:
This sea, I feel, is going to get drowned!
And she raced into the deep.
To rescue it.
Time and again Dimana Yordanova enters into implicit dialogues with Sunaj Akin and Bukowski, while sometimes she is in an explicit dialogue with Sylvia Plath:
And there is no way to learn how to fly, Sylvia
Without a lasting emptiness in the nests.
Everything pours out from this wound, Sylvia -
The fear, rhapsodies of knees that touch the ground.
Don’t cut the pain in its middle.
A sky desired to fall down, Sylvia.
From your first,
down to your third
person.
(‘Third person‘)
The urge for dialogue is perhaps the chief characteristic of this poetry; there are profound attempts at conversing with “self” as well as with “him”, the male figure being ostentatiously obscure and described by the poetess as: “He who once really existed, he who wasn’t there at all, he who one day will be, he who never will be.” Are lyrical words powerful enough for “her” to get across to “him”? Dimana Yordanova seems to believe they are.
Her poetic self is more than aware of the destructiveness immanent in human nature and imprisoned inside human flesh.
surreal heap
of skin,
and bones,
and muscles,
coronary valves,
and magic,
between them - connective tissue
assembled only to be scattered
(From ‘Down the backbone’)
Yet words are indestructible in their essence and they triumph in the end, says Dimana Yordanova in her poems. In some of the words can assume quite a quarrelsome character; the poetess is a skilful user of irony and sarcasm and will often interrogate social and cultural conventions with a knife and a torch (like she did with the conventions that a woman’s primary role is to be a mother and that abortion = killing in her last book of poetry “Letters to Nia, to whom I didn’t give birth”). There are other poems, though, where Dimana Yordanova’ s words would swaddle the author’s and the reader’s anxieties like babies and lull them into peace. Such words could be used as antidepressants quite successfully.
Dimana Yordanova was born in 1986 in Veliko Tarnovo. She graduated from a fine arts secondary school, then studied Balkan Studies. She has published three books of poetry: “The men and women I have been” (2017 ); “Down the backbone” (2018); and “Letters to Nia, to whom I did not give birth” (2020), all three of them printed by the Janet 45 publishing house. In 2019 her first book for children came out: “What a mess!” (Janet 45)
By Teodora Nikolova / Translated by Hristo Dimitrov / Edited by Tom Phillips
