The poems in this collection are sculpted like carnallite crystals and come together as elegiac meditations, drawing on history, and on mythology. Beauty and pathos are wound in a tangle of exile, and find a home. Offering free verse, prose poems, haibun and haiku. Ilona Martonfi uses her poetry to build on her activism as a tool for achieving goals, taking a stand.
“Ilona Martonfi’s latest poetry collection, Salt Bride, is a self-assured tour de force of the world’s tragedies, disasters and atrocities. Using a flattening-out-of-history technique, where the past marches in step with the present, Martonfi brings these events up close and personal in poems that taste lived. These are telegram-postcards, staccato darts from the heart of darkness, scenes of domesticity that suddenly burst into explosive imagery.”
—Michael Mirolla, novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright
“In Salt Bride, Ilona Martonfi’s poetry searches for justice. From deep, introspective locations, her words bring the reader close to what it means to suffer, to love, and to come to terms with loss. A skilled traveler in both inner and outer worlds, Martonfi speaks to us about the real, sometimes tragic, complexities of life.”
— Eleni Zisimatos, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Vallum Magazine
“In Salt Bride, Ilona Martonfi listens “to the pain beneath the skin of the streets,” giving voice to “[t]he marginal and the maimed. That which is cast out”. In the book’s five sections, Martonfi ranges throughout history and far-flung places, to give voice to or lament the dead—from the female victims sacrificed in bogs to appease pagan gods and goddesses, to victims of disasters, crimes, exile, and war, including three-year-old Syrian refugee and drowning victim Alan Kurdhi. In paying attention to “[s]craps, threads of memories,” Martonfi endeavours to counter “the crude amnesia” that allows history to repeat. The collection includes lyric poems, voice poems (stark dramatic monologues) and prose poems, often staccato in rhythm and spare in style, but stippled with luminous images: “small lilac skies // across iris bogs / willow catkins.” In Salt Bride we encounter a poetry of sorrow and solace.”
—Susan Elmslie, author of I, Nadja, and other Poems (Brick, 2006.)
“Ilona Martonfi’s Salt Bride is a book of beautifully crafted poems of grief and loss, elegies of silent struggle, giving voice to human experience before it slips into oblivion. Finely etched images of the urban and natural worlds frame each one with a subtle, ironic, yet compassionate resonance and reflection.”
—Hugh Hazelton, poet and translator, recipient of the 2006 Governor General’s award for French-English translation of Joël Des Rosiers’ Vétiver
“Ilona Martonfi’s Salt Bride is a wide-ranging lyrical collection, the poet’s fourth. Some sixty or so poems give voice to a wide range of carefully chosen events near and distant. There are those which rush like rivers, while others saunter under small lilac skies. Each delicate composition reverberates with intense feeling, vivid language, beauty.”
—Karen Ocaña, Literary translator and writer
Inanna Admin –
Salt Bride by Ilona Martonfi
reviewed by Vanessa Shields
The League of Canadian Poets – June 2, 2020
http://poets.ca/2020/06/02/review-salt-bride/
Martonfi’s fourth book, Salt Bride (Inanna Publications, 2019) is a collection of poetry that begs for companionship. This is not a collection for the faint of heart nor for the reader who doesn’t know her human atrocities his[her]story. Salt Bride is a deep dive into the atrocities that have brutally stolen lives around the world – and the ripple effects generations beyond. It is a cornucopia of loss, trauma, torture and violence dragged through the bogs, hillsides, streets and homes of our planet.
The companionship it calls for can be found in time, patience, and contemplation. This is not a one-sitting read for each piece needs an attention to detail that reaches beyond the page. To fully grasp the contextual components of chosen world tragedy, one might reach for a history book, a world map, or an internet search that helps further develop the time, place and happening Martonfi writes about.
Nature, wildlife, and weather are strong players in the re-opening of the wails and wounds of suffering the Salt Bride brings back to life and traipses through in the present. There are stories held in vigil by the climbing roses, plum trees, rivers and ravines that witnessed our dark and murderous actions. Martonfi calls out lost souls, lost memories, and the buried-deep sadness in a poeticized justice of remembering. The poetry is fat with rich imagery, haunting honesty and compassion that beautifully bursts through the brutality. This is the work of a highly seasoned poet; and the most powerful pieces are those that encompass Martonfi’s own family history.
She yawps as the voice of ‘the cursed land’, the ‘Magdalen Laundry’, the ‘concrete sarcophagus north of Kiev, Ukraine’ – and so many more. Interspersed with ekphrastic pieces re-visioning Degas, Monet, van Gogh, Cezanne; and revelatory personal pieces that offer moments of family trauma, reflection and love, Martonfi marches, crawls, hides and digs to uncover and rediscover the fallen as a reminder that we should never forget – or always remember. She refuses to let deletion be a reason for forgetting.
Through her powerful words, the ‘living dead’ also become a population to observe with honour and action. By holding up excerpts of the past and essentially exemplifying treatment of mental illness, it’s clear to see that monumentally harmful mistakes were made – and that many continue to be made. There are questions begging answers upon reviewing this book.
Is it the poet’s purpose to hold up a mirror to humanity? To be archeologists of time expressed through the written word? To be architects of remembering by building layers of metaphor that ‘display madness and grammar of space’? To consistently re-reveal the past, scream at the present and philosophize for the future? Interpretation of events can breed a hotbed of negotiations – yet we are still compelled as poets to stand steadfast on the fine line of whose stories are told and how and by whom. Salt Bride is an offering, a collection of lifted lamentations from the past woven into the present with a nod to a future where remembering is, indeed, the landscape on which poets can travel – mirror in one hand, pen in the other.
Inanna Admin –
Flowers by the Refugee’s Road: A Review of Salt Bride by Ilona Martonfi
reviewed by Matthew Rettino – June 11, 2020
https://matthewrettino.com/2020/06/02/review-salt-bride/
In her latest poetry collection, Salt Bride (Inanna Publications, 2019), Ilona Martonfi reinvents herself by creating a narrative out of her past–one in which she has had to reinvent herself many times, as a child refugee, mother, battered wife, activist, and, finally, as a poet. Hers is a refugee’s experience down to the very form and content of her lines; the search for place and home inspires her poetry, sometimes in unexpected ways. In the furtive fragments of her free verse lines, one detects a longing for impressions to stick, for a sentence to settle. But Martonfi’s voice is productively restless. Danger forces the refugee on the road, but she can still appreciate the beauty in a field of flowers.
In addition to her own, personal past, Martonfi tells the histories of other people. Her opening poem describes the environmental devastation around Shinkolobwe, an abandoned Congolese village where the uranium for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan was mined. An “official nonplace” (1), Shinkolobwe is a home that has been erased. Nagaski, in her second poem, “The Fourth Panel: Ghosts,” is another example. With haiku-like economy, she speaks from the voice of victim of the atomic bomb blast: “the ocean still, low winds. / 11:02 a.m. August 9, 1945 / was the day I died” (3–5). Her understatement is not a shout out against injustice but a quiet witnessing of the victim’s experience.
In her witness poems, she uses her sparse, imagistic style to pay witness to the Chernobyl disaster, the Babi Yar massacre, the bombing of Budapest, and the Birkenau concentration camp, among other topics. She marks the time-and-place specificity of each trauma to memorialize it; the litany of place names and times of day develop their own poetic rhythm, their own stark, metronymic effect. But she never forgets the beauty of the natural landscape, which seems at times to encode the idea of home, especially in places where all sense of home has been destroyed and remembering it has become more important than ever.
For example, “Srebrenica” tells the story of a man’s brother, a victim of the Bosnian genocide. It is told from survivor’s first-person viewpoint:
hands bound behind his back.
My brother is here
summer of 1995
in a mass grave in Bosnia
fourteen years old
Avdija buried without his head
gravedigger
sheep, goats
walnut trees
climbing roses
white skulls
of the mountain. (6–17)
In this description of a grave, a home for the dead, her staccato imagery has the spontaneous clarity of Japanese poetry. The natural world is never far from Martonfi’s awareness; the beauty that lies by the wayside of trauma recalls the value of the lives lost.
Eventually, Martonfi turns to her own past to write about her family’s experience as Hungarian refugees during and after the Second World War. In poems like “Easter Sunday,” she reconstructs her earliest childhood memories. Representing herself as a “pigtailed Magyar refugee girl” (22), she tempers a sense of her innocence and naivety with her adult awareness of the secrets that her family never discussed at the time (personal interview). Fields of flowers and a new dress to wear are at the centre of this ten-year-old child’s world, until she discovers the “unfound” body of her mother, who has attempted suicide (17). “All the time I carry with me / the odour of spring / the odour of funeral,” the speaker states (5–6).
Smell is supposed to be the sense most strongly tied to memory; but what occasionally concretizes the past for Martonfi is sound. Lines of dialogue bring back the past with immediacy. Dialogue can draw up a specific childhood memory, or a memory of a fateful conversation, as in “The Vigil on Puget Sound,” a lament for her late brother. Other exclamations hit. In “White Lilacs,” she quotes her assertive reprimand against her abusive husband:
Lined with row houses
1215 rue Saint-André
tight knots of violence
[…]
Your four children. His fists.
“Shorty, I will divorce you!”
“I will divorce you,” you said. (1–3, 38–40)
Martonfi renders the violence in the relationship explicit. Her oral assertion of agency reaches out from the poem like it does from the past; her promise to divorce is her response to her husband’s fists.
In examining her own life, Martonfi writes about her own children and what it was like to live with a batterer husband. Though equating a poet with her speaker is usually problematic, Martonfi states that these poems reflect her experiences completely and that standing up against domestic violence is her life’s calling (personal interview). This said, her poetry has been a vehicle for the reinvention and re-fashioning of her identity. In the prose poem “Casa dei Zetti,” she furnishes a villa with a catalogue of domestic details, describing how it is “a house for art” (3), despite the presence of the violence that puts her “arms on the ceiling. Head on the wall (15).” Art is a way to recover from abuse and, in the end, to master one’s past. “Every day, I reconstructed myself,” she says (14), highlighting the importance of art for her recovery.
Martonfi’s poetry is especially sympathetic to the plight of children. In “The Fourth Panel: Ghosts,” she speaks of the “children / who will die once again” (22–23). The children who continue to suffer due to society’s inability to learn from the past serve as indictments of that society. In “Girl in Dubrulle Wood,” she speaks of a girl who was “snatched in a playground / in front of her mother” (16–17). In “Small River,” an Inuk woman recalls her grandparents’ traditional way of life, before she was taken to a Residential School–another form of kidnapping. “I was just four when taken,” her speaker says (19). “Small River,” like “The Fourth Panel,” is respectful of the other’s voice, reporting the facts of their trauma and letting the reader supply emotion.
Martonfi’s own childhood as a refugee, as recalled in her poems, parallels the experiences of these children. In fact, “Funeral Prayer for Alan Kurdî” can be read as one child refugee’s prayer to another: from Martonfi younger self to a boy who never made it to safety. Alan Kurdî is the Syrian refugee boy who drowned en route to the island of Kos in the Aegean Sea and whose photograph became one of the pietàs of the Syrian refugee crisis. As a former child refugee, Martonfi expresses her wish for Alan, and for all children displaced by conflict: “O little boy, Alan. / O God, give him a home” (15–17).
Given this powerful subject matter, which manages to be both personal and historical, one could risk overlooking Martonfi’s less eventful, more form-based poems. But to do so would mean to overlook her experiments, which inform the aesthetics of the rest of her collection. The well-crafted word-strokes of her ekphrastic Van Gogh poems express her verbal impressionism. In addition, her Cézanne poems, contained in “Les Lauves,” are a series of haiku which paint an impression of Cézanne’s art studio in Aix-en-Provence: “red-tile roof stone house / chasing the ghosts of artists / mistral in blue pines” (7–9). Additionally, “Sea Urchin” echoes this form in a series of oceanic haiku with mythological overtones, hinting at the mysterious depths that lie beneath the haiku itself: a concept that can be summarized in the Japanese aesthetic of yūgen.
In short, these poems reiterate the aesthetic that defines the rest of the collection. Fusing the personal with the historical, and impressionism with yūgen, Salt Bride offers the reader history with personal depths.
Matthew Rettino is a speculative fiction writer who lives in the West Island of Montreal. His first story, “The Pilgrim’s Yoke,” appeared in Bards and Sages Quarterly in 2018, while his forthcoming story, “The Goddess In Him,” will appear in September 2020 with NewMyths.com. He works as a freelance editor and leads courses at the Thomas More Institute. His Master’s thesis on modern fantasy, “Fantasy as a Peripheral Modernism: Uneven Development in Charles de Lint’s Urban Fantasy” is free to read online. He is presently working on an archaeological thriller with a weird fiction twist inspired by Jorge Luis Borges. For more on Matthew, follow him on Twitter, and be sure to check out his blog, portfolio, and monthly newsletter.