Rebecca Bilkau\u2019s pamphlet “Choosing New Omens” deals with the experience of moving to a new country, Germany, with her German husband and the struggles of identity, language and sense of belonging that entails. Throughout the pamphlet there\u2019s an awareness of history, both personal and cultural and nowhere is this more boldly confronted than in this, the first poem of the pamphlet.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a poem which demonstrates many of the qualities apparent throughout the pamphlet and indeed throughout her writing generally. There\u2019s a colloquial flow in which serious emotions and ideas are addressed with directness and passion. When she reads there\u2019s a strong sense of engagement in her delivery which remains present on the page.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>On Not Going to Bergen-Belsen<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Sunday evening and bluegrass music drives us<\/p>\n through an everywhere and nowhere till we hit<\/p>\n a babel of welcome signs.<\/p>\n Slowly the name<\/p>\n translates itself into sense. An eternity of mourners<\/p>\n must find open doors, open language here<\/p>\n where fact shatters speech.<\/p>\n And all I can see<\/p>\n is a crumbling ridge of hips, not here in the car,<\/p>\n not on the road, but in all my pictures of this land<\/p>\n till I married into it.<\/p>\n Around the cleats<\/p>\n of intimately tangled dead, righteously articulate<\/p>\n through seven decades of doomed atonement<\/p>\n in this quiet country, my new shock.<\/p>\n I pull my hand<\/p>\n back from Michael\u2019s attempted squeeze. Please but his sentence has nowhere to go. No more<\/p>\n German than ten minutes ago<\/p>\n he\u2019s not my husband<\/p>\n now, not my sweet old leftie, he\u2019s a Roman salute<\/p>\n in camouflage, an explanation machine whose words<\/p>\n beggar vocabulary. All vocabulary.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a museum<\/p>\n at the death camp. We should go. He should go.<\/p>\n My first love was a Jew. Michael owes it to him<\/p>\n and, suddenly, me.<\/p>\n My husband rests<\/p>\n his head on the steering wheel. He\u2019s been guilty<\/p>\n as sin since before he was conceived. Has never<\/p>\n known inculpability<\/p>\n since he could read.<\/p>\n Like the wife whose own post-colonial guilt is the cringe<\/p>\n of history under the bloody carpet.<\/p>\n I put my hand in reach,<\/p>\n and twined in the relief of grief we search for grace<\/p>\n together; inarticulately grateful for the blessed irony<\/p>\n of winter opening times.<\/p>\n From the very outset the title sets the scene with the ambiguity of \u2018not going there\u2019 when how can you not once the name of the place is mentioned. Then the innocuous bluegrass music carries us towards \u2018a babel of welcome signs\u2019 (clever use of that word \u2018babel\u2019), the translation of the name of the place into \u2018sense\u2019 or its reality \u2013 the \u2018cleats\/ of intimately tangled dead\u2019.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a new shock, too, the poet\u2019s withdrawal from her husband who\u2019s \u2018been guilty\/as sin since before he was conceived\u2019. As a reader I\u2019m totally caught up in this, the unavoidable conflict, the way the poet is plunged into heady emotions, the sudden need to generalise, apportion collective guilt, and her husband\u2019s \u2018Please\u2019 and his helplessness before the enormity of a history he\u2019s not responsible for but is nonetheless associated with. And as we\u2019re being taken through this scene, there\u2019s a return to reason and compassion which culminates in self-realisation with \u2018the wife whose own post-colonial guilt\u2026\u2019 at which point I let out my held breath, relieved to find hands twined again.<\/p>\n The last stanza carries in its irony the truth that you don\u2019t have to go all the way to arrive. Perhaps the best way of dealing with these powerful emotions is to acknowledge them, as this poem does, and move on.<\/p>\n For me the articulate honesty of this poem is added to by the form which reflects the see-saw of emotions and thoughts, cleverly moving this way and that through a series of linked stanzas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rebecca Bilkau\u2019s pamphlet “Choosing New Omens” deals with the experience of moving to a new country, Germany, with her German husband and the struggles of identity, language and sense of belonging that entails. Throughout the pamphlet there\u2019s an awareness of history, both personal and cultural and nowhere is this more boldly confronted than in this, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5v6l4-cQ","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wayleavepress.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em><\/p>\n