Poetry opens the door
Book review by Carol Leff and Paul Mason
How to Open the Door by Marike Beyers
Marike Beyers is a Grahamstown poet whose poetry has appeared in several anthologies and journals. Her first chapbook titled On Another Page was published in 2011 by Aerial Publishing. Her latest collection of poems, How to open the door, grew from Beyers’s MA in Creative Writing which she completed at Rhodes University in 2014.
Introducing Marike Beyers at the Grahamstown launch which took place recently at the National English Literary Museum (Nelm), Robert Berold said that Beyers was one of those poets who do not know what they are saying until they are actually saying it. He quoted a line from the ancient Tao te Ching: “Great eloquence seems inarticulate.” This kind of poetry has a long tradition, he said, “the impulse comes from behind language – floundering for utterance, it bends and breaks syntax, making language new. Marike’s poems are like this".
Before reading from her work, Beyers herself added that “poetry is not about being linguistically clever, but more about searching for what is beyond words, or at an edge of what is sayable”. The cover of this collection, by Grahamstown artist Roxandra Dardagan Britz, gives the book the feeling that you are carefully opening a door as you enter the pages, where simple things are given form and shape in the poems.
As with her previous collection of poems, On Another Page, this collection moves in a meditative four-part harmony. The first part revolves around memories of her grandparents, the second concerns memories of her brother and sister and her childhood city, the third expresses childhood vulnerabilities that linger, and the fourth part offers a forward-looking vision that casts its gaze back on her past. The composition is skilfully crafted, with each section simultaneously self-contained and interlaced. There is throughout, an undercurrent of strangeness and alienation.
The poems present strings of images that move from the quotidian to the vividly private. In one instant the reader recognises what the poet observes – streets, buses, cars, tables, windows, junctions, pedestrian bridges and, significantly, doors. In the next instant we meet an image that suggests being both part of and apart from:
These are the streets I know the trees shudder in the wind folded inside I only find these two suitcases and heavy feet (winter’s throat)
Images of nature and the body are coupled, but the coupling is an illusion, perhaps a betrayal: What has become of the stranger who could sing the words of trees and walk the way of the moon now that the mountains have become fists and the sky a back without shoulders (drowning)
The stranger’s discomfort is echoed in the concluding stanza of ‘you came back’: The plain could be crossed I thought your shadow would fall on the ground I thought but there you stood your mouth of broken birds
The words that lead to the final line are consummately paced, such that they bring to this line an astonishing weight, making it unforgettable, a masterpiece. There are other such finely engineered masterpieces. If strangeness and alienation can be considered as the undercurrent of this collection, it can be said the overarching message hinges on the image of the door, as contained in the title of the poem, the last line of "nothing looked back" and the final line of the concluding poem:
is it all too simple is home then this standing in an open door
Questions are posed throughout, and this poem poses more than any other. None of the questions are burdened by question marks. The poet stands at the threshold of the open door, looking into the room or outside of it. The indecision, the strangeness, the compelling liberty of the inexplicable: therein lies the charm of this collection of poems.